#i’m positive i could pull this into the fandomization of media consumption + the idea of media as identity but it’s dinner time

[animebw]

Binge-Watching: Gintama, Episodes 182-184

In which we get what’s legitimately one of the most inventive, awe-inspiring meta commentaries I’ve ever seen, as the show hashes out an age old fandom dispute using its own characters as the voice of its audience.

Pierce the Heavens With Your Meta!

You know, I give a lot of praise to how Gintama keeps topping its more serious and dramatic arcs. And with good reason; they’re regularly the most impactful, memorable moments, the standard bearers for the heights this show is able to achieve. But every once in a while, it’s worth taking a step back and remembering how well the comedy has developed in tandem. The early episodes were still pretty funny, but now, with the density of characters and in-jokes and lore the show’s established, and its creative wellspring still bursting with life, it’s able to use all that meticulous groundwork as a springboard to soar to new comedic heights. And my god, I think it might have just topped itself again with the Popularity Poll arc. This might be the most insanely creative idea Gintama’s ever had; incorporating the meta perception of a show by its audience into an actual story is the kind of premise that only a show with as cavalier a relationship with the fourth wall as this one could even dream of pulling off. But Gintama doesn’t just pull it off, it sticks the landing so damn hard I think the landing might’ve cracked a bit from the impact.

Seriously, just imagine how this idea would’ve sounded as a pitch for any other show: a story arc where the characters all react to a recent audience popularity poll and start fighting each other to rise in the ranking. It’s utterly batshit in every conceivable fashion. But here’s the thing: fandoms love engaging in arguments about this stuff. Character A is just a cheap rip-off of Character B! Character C is a clone of Character D! Character E has a better design than Character F! These are the kinds of arguments that any fans of a show, movie, or whatever else with an expansive cast will hash out endlessly, fighting over their favorites and analyzing the author’s intentions behind creating them. These are the fights that make fandom so entertaining (and occasionally exhausting when these debates cross over into outright toxicity, but I’m trying to be positive here). And what Gintama does here is absolutely freaking genius: it takes those arguments and debates that every fan is familiar with and puts them in the mouths of the characters themselves. This could only work in this kind of show, where the characters regularly acknowledge their existence as fictional characters in a media property created for mass consumption. It’s a literal meta commentary by the show’s creator, spoken directly through his character’s mouths, on how his audience has received his work. The text and metatext are one and the same, yet the world of the show does not shatter to deliver such a direct message because of its previously established flexibility. It’s not just the most meta Gintama’s ever been, it might be the single most meta story I’ve ever seen.

The end result of this utterly fantastic idea is that suddenly, these characters we’ve come to know and love over the course of almost 200 episodes now are having the same arguments about each other that we’ve been having about them all this time. And with the premise itself necessitating the involvement of so many different characters from so many different chapters in the show’s history, we get to see so many utterly delightful match-ups and pairings we’ve never gotten to seen before. Of course the supporting female cast would all join together to form an epic girl group death squad. Of course Sadaharu and Elizabeth would shed blood in competition to be the king of the giant animal mascots. Of course Katsura and Kyubei would clash over sharing the “absolute dork hiding behind a regal facade” persona; hell, I’m 90% sure I made that comparison myself some time ago! Of course Kondo would use his previously established history with embarrassing nudity and compromising situations to give him a natural leg up in the game of pantsing shame. Of course all the kickass ladies would debate the merits of their distinct character designs (Sachan on Tsukuyo’s scar and pipe: ”This girl’s loaded with hooks!”). Of course the characters who got low scores in the rankings would try to imitate the higher-ups to close the gap. Of course we would get more of the fantastically bratty rivalry between Kagura and Okita, both of them vying to the most snot-nosed sneerer in the house. It’s like watching your wildest fanfiction brought to life, the very characters of the show themselves acting out the images of them you have in your head.

And it’s so. Damn. Funny. It’s constantly one-upping itself, constantly surprising you with another detail that feels like it sprung fully formed from the ashes of your last anime club debate. The familiarity we have with these characters at this point is reflected in the familiarity they have with each other, and the end result feels like a show that is more in on the joke with us than any other show ever. And that’s all before we even get to the more tangible, screw-with-the-medium gags that accent the more abstract, thematic stuff. Everybody’s popularity numbers following them around, floating in the air, could’ve just been a simple sight gag, but instead, they’re actually made part of the freaking world. Characters can share them, break them, drop them, snap them off their heads and leave a trail of blood behind (seriously, how does that even work?). They’re used to mark people without actually showing them, leading to a hilarious scene where Ginoki and Shinpachi are chased behind a row of buildings and we just see a horde of numbers barreling after them. And then there’s Otae literally reaching through the screen and killing the goddamn mangaka. Which leads to the show itself devolving as the creators struggle to fill the void themselves, climaxing in the gob-smackingly inspired gag of the opening being rendered in MS Paint. My god, that had me doubled over like nobody’s business. Just, how fucking brilliant is that? In a world where fan recreations of OPs in Paint are becoming especially popular, this one gag feels like such a perfect encapsulation of how attuned this show is to its own space in popular culture.

Gintama, more than anything, feels like it’s as much a part of its own fandom as we are, constantly debating and critiquing and exalting itself right alongside its audience. It’s the show that laughs along with itself, the storyteller that makes the audience part of the story. It’s such a unique, inspired atmosphere that’s like nothing else I’ve ever watched: it’s practically invented its own damn genre. And it wants its fans to enjoy this wild ride as much as it is itself.

Everybody Matters

Because underneath the sheer hilarity of, well, literally everything I just talked about, there’s a much more meaningful meta point being made about this show’s relationship to its fandom. Yamazaki basically starts the whole bloodbath because he’s pissed at his type of character- the straight man- never being the most popular among the fans. And he’s right; even I will always prefer the wild antics of Kagura and Gintoki over Shinpachi’s aggravated attempts at grounding them. On a broader level, every character in this arc could very well be speaking with the voice of frustration of the fans who don’t feel like their favorites get their due by the rest of the fandom. They all have reasons to believe their favorite character deserves more. It’s a classic fandom struggle that I’m sure everybody has experienced at one point or another. And it’s this debate that Gintama captures so well in this arc; the inflamed passions, the best of everyone on full display, the increasing toxicity of the debate poisoning everyone’s opinions on everyone.

But here’s the thing: Gintama doesn’t need to give into that toxicity. Because it has, no bullshit, one of the best ensemble casts of all time. Every single character from rank 30 up could top the best character list of hundreds of other anime. They’re all so distinct and varied that if the show lost any of them, the impact would be immediate and affecting. Every single goddamn character has a part to play, from the eccentrics to the sadists, from the megalomaniacs to the champions, and yes, to the straight men as well. Shinpachi and Yamazaki are just as essential components of this masterfully crafted mechanism as anyone else, keeping a level of sanity that we can always return to when things get too crazy. As cliche as it might sound, all of them deserve to be number 1. All of them are important enough to be beloved and respected.

In the end, this entire arc is, simply put, an extended defense of Gintama’s entire supporting cast, and the invaluable, utterly unique roles they all play in making this show so special. And it delivers that message as only Gintama can: by going beyond its limits to deliver one of the most inspired meta commentaries I’ve ever seen in a piece of media, speaking with the mouthpiece of its fandom in praise of all it’s been able to accomplish. It’s absurd. It’s grandiose. It would absolutely feel utterly pretentious if the show hadn’t earned every moment of it over the past 180 episodes. It is nothing more or less... than Gintama.

And I can think of no higher praise than that.

Odds and Ends

-”This show’s been nothing but lies...” Ten seconds in and I’m already cackling.

-Takeaways from the popularity poll: shame on you for putting Tama so low, pleased that Tsukuyo’s so high, very surprised Kagura’s monster of a brother placed so high. I mean, he definitely left an impression, but it was more of a “AAAAAAAHHHHHGETAWAYGETAWAYGETAWAYGETAWYAY” sort of deal for me.

-askjdashd they kept the mohawk on Yamazaki

-”It’s not your fault if you lose to a lifeless object.” The fact that the freaking Justaway counts as a character cracks me up.

-”I can’t stand the fact that Otae isn’t first...” Oh my bloodthirsty genderfluid baby I love you

-Sachan’s freakouts in these episodes were star-kissed gold.

-One sour note: we had a Fist of the North Star parody without a single “Omiwa mu shindeao”. You’re slipping in your reference game, GIntama. Shame on you.

-”The nightmare started when I decided I wanted to see those paws close up.” This is your daily reminder that Katsura is an animal whisperer of the highest caliber.

-”You idiots have done nothing but speak in bad English!” You say that like it’s a bad thing, Shinpachi.

-Interesting observation that I think I’ve touched on before: Kyubei, like Tsukuyo, has the “freak out when men touch me” character trait, but unlike when it happens to Tsukuyo, Kyubei’s instances of this never fail to make me laugh because there’s never anything actually sexual or perverse about the ways people touch her. It’s just her lunatic instincts getting the best of her, which is a million times more entertaining than just stupid pervert shit.

-”Stop saying crap that’ll bring down the fourth wall!” Hijikata, do you... remember what show you’re in at all?

-Only in this show would a coordinated dress-up battle be an important life-or-death scenario. Especially a dress-up battle on the same goddamn person.

-”He was on two legs, right?” Shinpachi is as perturbed as I am. What the shit, Sadaharu.

I don’t know how it does it, man. This show’s just really fucking good. See you next time!

[blackwoolncrown]

curious to hear your thoughts bc i think they're sharp, as a person still figuring out fandom. what do you think of the moral okayness of thorki (the ship)? they're brothers, but gods.... godly incest? at what point does "ship what you want" stop applying?

It’s not so much about where it stops applying. Understand that I actually never have said what people should or shouldn’t read- only that what a person chooses to focus on in general (and therefore including what you write, watch, or read) is indicative of something and in many cases of certain taboo* or violent material my heavy suggestion is that that something is ultimately meaningful.

It’s not ‘just’ fiction.

So like, me personally? I often don’t actually care what someone is into (with some logical exceptions), I care whether or not they’re aware of why, because often people would rather not inspect the why so they can keep enjoying problematic media (and also my actual Big Thing is I don’t approve of situations where someone engages in activity they are not fully aware of, because to me if you aren’t aware of the consequences or origins of your actions, you haven’t fully consented to what you’re doing and that makes me sad. Example: Do you smoke cigarettes? Fine! It’s your body; as long as you aren’t exposing non-smokers to second hand smoke, no one should have shit to say. But if you start smoking bc you believe that cigarettes aren’t actually bad for you and there’s no downsides, you haven’t fully consented and now I wish you either a) inspected your motives and actions or b) stopped).

Overall I suspect that many of the most vociferous defenders of ‘fiction is just fiction!’ are people whose interests often veer into what we often call taboo (I think that word is so ineffective) who don’t want to ask themselves why. My other general rule is that people are most doggedly defensive about what they get off to. There’s also the issue of people having already brought to question their fictive interests and instead of wanting to find out the answer, deciding There’s Nothing To See Here, Fiction Is Just Fiction! Or, on the cusp of identifying a maladaptive interest and feeling as if that’s an action of self-judgment, they identify with their fictive interest because to them judging it means judging themselves.

Ideally neither is necessary. You can just understand that you got into something at a previous time but you’ve grown past it, learned from it, and can walk away from it without shame. After all, it’s ideally just your business. All I’m saying is that you know what the fuck your business is, pardon my french, because people who don’t know themselves are….well, it’s an issue.So to answer your question, here’s another question: If Thor and Loki were not brothers, would you care as much? Imagine a situation in which Thor and Loki are not related, but still share a lusty rivalry. Is something missing? What is it? What about them being gods absolves, in your mind, the impact of their siblinghood?Often, something like sibling incest (which to me is, honestly, not my bag but obviously way less awful than parent/child due to a whole slew of issues with imbalance there) is exciting to people simply because either a) the incest is the barrier to love and in general barriers to love make ‘good’ stories because two people overcoming the bounds of a romantic limitation is a more moving story than two people who can love freely (bc we love suffering and strife! it seasons things, I guess lol) and the incest is just an easy yet huge barrier b) because we have a hard time working through something without sexualizing it and who could write or would want to read about two brothers’ having a heartfelt love/hate brotherhood? Very few people, apparently, because that’s not a valued interaction. Thus, add some fucking into the story and Thor and Loki can work out their antagonistic feelings without getting to the bottom of them because we imagine sex is an equalizer and a balm (it’s not, but I understand the idea has a huge place in erotic fiction and absolutely use it myself when I write for fun).That speaks, to me, of an issue (and I’m going to be specific here) with not really having the language or familiarity with the social concept of brotherly love to make a story about it and its struggles interesting. We don’t have the language and thus cannot conceive of brother/brother reconciliation without sex. And this again speaks of a larger issue our society has with sex and the huge void of emotionality between strangers and lovers (friendships, loyalty. non-sexual bonding? What’s that?). We cannot conceive of a way to intensify, for the sake of adult (in age, not nature) entertainment, something like siblinghood without using sex.

It’s just cheap writing.

On the other hand, the very real ramifications of this easy-route conflict writing is that it sexualizes and normalizes sibling incest (or other things in the case of other stories) and I think it’s incredibly callous to want to ignore the voices of SA victims in this regard. People like to retort that ‘well YOU might not be able to tell fiction from reality, but I can’ but here’s the thing: Your subconscious mind can’t. If your brain wholly knew that the fiction you were reading was Not-Reality the information would be irrelevant and would fail to produce an emotional response. The reason we are excited, aroused, sad, scared, angry, tense, etc during movies and books is because while we are focused on them our mind is interpreting the happenings as actual happenings. To the extent (!) that media ‘pulls you in’, your  subconscious believes it, validates it, and signals responses accordingly. That’s why it’s entertaining.

I say this because something many fans of certain content don’t want to face is that the consumption and support of, and proximity to certain types of violent or taboo content starts to lessen your reaction to them. I’m not speaking as an outsider, here, and so I caution you and anyone else to second-guess the awareness of anyone who says ‘there’s no way that’s true!’. What you repeatedly experience becomes normal for you. This doesn’t apply as heavily with Thorki or similar ships bc of the conceptual complexity (it’s pretty far-removed) but there are certainly fetishes/ships  where repeated exposure lessens your reaction to that concept in general. As if that doesn’t seem to be problem enough, since this is an issue of entertainment, this also means that a person seeks more of the content. After all, what fic fan reads just one story about their scandalous OTP? You need more, or more extreme versions. And I’m not talking out of my ass here- people for some reason love incest- it’s one of the top-searched terms on any adult media site for general consumption. On sites that it’s not, that’s only because the term itself is blacklisted and users use some other coded term. In the absence of pearl-clutching, we must recognize that smutty fiction and tube sites’ activities are largely the same. b/b m/s and f/d incest continue to draw attention and I honestly don’t know why. 

And this is why I pay no mind to people who say that fiction has no effect on reality. Even if it didn’t, it arises from our reality. The real minds of real writers in the real world. And I’ve seen the results. I work with sex and fetishes- it’s my job. I know what people as a whole are into and I’m begging y’all: UNPACK THIS BAGGAGE. Soooo many fetishes are just maladaptive coping mechanisms, so talk of ‘fiction being just fiction’ are literally bullshit. Fetish, and the relative psychology of it, is my job, to the point that it’s also what I have to navigate to try and ensure my safety (by avoiding volatile fetishists) and income (my first job, for instance, was a porn artist, and by now I’m an adult content producer and prodomme). And again, many fetishes are the back end of intense or subconsciously formative moments in our lives. The attraction is not ‘the thing’, it is a thread us leading back to that moment, to learn from our experiences, to resolve past issues with the wiser perspective of our older selves.Again, there’s not much going on in terms of Thor/Loki here but on a wider scale there is. Often in fandom, for instance, it’s not really about the ship so much as the fetish. It’s disguised in the language of fandom, but people who have a bunch of incest ships are incest fetishists, full stop. There’s no difference in motive between them and the ~gross pervert guys~ reblogging porn gifs and adding incest prose to them. If geeks could more often find porn gifs that looked like their taboo OTP rest assured they’d do the same damn thing, most of them. Ficlovers like to act like their position is somehow more morally acceptable because there are no ‘real’ people involved like in porn, but whether or not a physical body is used to represent the characters/roles is a pedantic and nebulous distinction at best. Your interest is still your interest. And people are going to hate this, but it sounds so much like pedophiles on 4chan  who say that their ‘fetish’ is okay because the characters aren’t real. Furries into cubs (not the gay dude kind but the baby animal kind) feel justified the same way because the figures are fantasy creatures. But they’re still expressly coded as the infantile versions of adult characters, and again, the motive is the same. I’m not saying ALL of these things are one to one, I’m saying it’s a similar logic: “This is a fantasy and as such it says nothing about me. It would only matter if I physically did it.” Which is dishonest and illogical bc one’s fantasies  and interests arise out of their own minds. Porn consumption is a night map of the human social psyche. It’s not ‘nothing’.

Sure, most of those people would probably never touch a child, but that’s because the real world provides consequences the fantasy world doesn’t- not because they’re not interested. I know bc I’ve seen them say that themselves, many times. I was a 4chan teen. What was normal there would make a well-adjusted person puke. But I was maladaptive, impressionable and young at the time and it became normal for me. So many forms of incest, rape, pedophilia, bestiality etc became normal in the ‘shock makes things acceptable’ speed-posting culture of neverending offensiveness there. And that’s not just a 4chan thing. It’s a group anonymity thing. Any imageboard vet can tell you that. When you’re in the anonymous group, what the group does is what you do, and you go along with it, continuously being desensitized until you suddenly go WTF or…keep going. And having seen these arguments before, I’m wary of those who go to battle on the idea of all erotic fiction being totally beyond judgement, because often what is going on is that people whose interests should be judged, at the very least by themselves, argue against that so that there are other people who feel the same way who don’t realize they’ve been manipulated to cloak the offenders in their community.

But I digress.

Since my feelings on Killmonger fans* started this, I’ll offer an example of my own: I think AoU Ultron is hot. But I don’t actually want to fuck him. I wouldn’t be interested in any ‘reader x Ultron’ narratives. Why? Because despite my love for and identification with  many villains (usually bc of their victim’s rage and queer coding which always leaves them far cooler and better dressed than the hero) and my love for robots, I can’t ignore that Ultron is a heartless, people-hating, death-machine. He has no interest in love, doesn’t care about anyone, and if he bothered to fuck a person (I fucking doubt it) he’d gladly fuck them apart. And since I love myself, I don’t find that appealing. If I found the idea of being fucked to death by a robot arousing, that says something about how I feel about my existence. I know bc I am strangely fascinated by the idea of armageddon (another reason Ultron appealed to me). Spoilers: it’s just easier to feel like you want the whole world to end when you’re so certain there’s no other solution and you yourself are afraid of the emotional responsibility of weathering the world and social interactions. When you love yourself and other people, the idea of seeing the world burn stops being so entrancing. So sure it’s an enthralling literary concept. Is it something I dedicate my blog to or obsess over?

No.

Other things I’ve examined- my love for robots. Do I find myself attracted to robots because they are humanoids you can objectify free of moral conflict? No, and that sucks for me bc that’s why most people like them and that affects the kind of adult media made about them (can you tell im bitter), it’s because I find humanoid robots to be something I can identify with, I see them as symbolically human, and relating to them is, to me, acknowledging that a human is also a construct with both programming and a will of its own it uses to explore and often fight that programming. My attraction to the concept of an automaton stems from my early realization that my own body is but a fantastic collection of parts, electric signals, programmed genetic data, pulleys and fuel. Amazing! Now that I know that, have I stopped consuming robot fetish media? Well yes but only because I can’t find any I like…but in general, no. I’m not ashamed of my attraction, I’ve unpacked it, faced it, and go on about  my life. It actually did lessen the obsession, though.

So, to stay on point, sibling incest as a concept is IMO not ‘wrong’ to write/read about objectively but it is questionable to perpetuate, romanticize, fawn over, collect, celebrate, etc.  Most problematic to me is the issue of how these ships are identified. Generally any time there are 2 handsome brothers in a piece of media, some not-small-enough contingency of the fandom assumes they’re fucking, and sees all forms of affection or antagonism between them as evidence of their lust.

What does this say about your ability to recognize sibling love? What does it say about the social value (or lack thereof) of the same? When ‘all feelings lead to sex’ is the overarching theme of our entire society, I can’t really say I am uncritical of concepts like hatesex and incest being so intensely attractive to people over, say, romantic love between two people who are not related by blood. A bit of a tangent but similarly while I get the chemistry appeal, the fact that ‘hatesex’ as a concept (two people who often express aggression, hatred, intolerance etc of each other being interpreted as actually masking feelings of attraction) is so popular is ripe for questioning. How far removed is it from “He picks on you  because he likes you” and other maladaptive forms of “loving someone means hurting them…a lot” which are real actual problems people suffer for right now?

Plus, it begins to suggest as I said before that all forms of affection/relationship end in sex. Even if sex never happens, sex must logically be the apex of love if two characters who have any kind of affection, even if that affection is also seen in the presence of aggression (!) or a moral barrier (family bond), are easily assumed to be sexually compatible to the extent that fandom perpetuates.

So back to your point, this is again not really an issue (as far as where I’m coming from) with what’s right and wrong. It’s an issue of people needing to take responsibility for themselves and being curious about their own issues and interests. I’m not advocating for censorship- I’m advocating for people to enlighten themselves about themselves in which case a lot of ‘taboo’ media would be produced in a lessened capacity.

I find it interesting that when I ask “Why are you into ____?” people don’t answer that question, or seem unwilling to, since their first reaction is to flip out and cry censorship. No one seems to notice that that’s not what I’m actually saying lol.

I don’t care what people do, if it’s not hurting someone. I care that people know why they do what they do. I am critical of things and of myself. I think people should just dare to be critical. It’s a great tool for self-healing that doesn’t involve perpetuating damage.*I dislike the term taboo because it and the moral judgment it applies is a nebulous term that is used far too broadly. Incestuous pedophiles soften their interest by calling it ‘taboo’, but interracial relationships are also classed as ‘taboo’, thereby suggesting that the term is as loose as ‘whatever many people think is wrong’, which is clearly far too transient and easily-influenced. Often, I find, it’s used as ‘something that is morally objectionable for reasons we’re not going to explore, we’re just going to lump all this shit together indiscriminately as taboo’.

*Again, I don’t care about people who mainly think MBJ is hot as Killmonger, that’s totally logical. I question people whose fantasies specifically extend to Killmonger THE CHARACTER being seen as sexually attractive **because** of/specifically on the grounds of his general character (i.e. radicalized, violent, murderous, apathetic) and what kind of person would fantasize about being subject to a man like that.

[gary--martin]

#

song stories

To put all this design thinking to the test we've been asked to put it into practice in a rapid cycle through the exploration of a short term group project. For this project, massively inspired by our experience of Araby's performance at the first CMP Salon event back in November, we all wanted to explore the idea of long-form folk music performances as a podcast format. With the ever-decreasing duration of traditional music streaming listening habits, there is a beautiful opportunity for musicians to occupy a space that has been created by this shift; an opposing space of longer-form musical narrative. Song Stories would provide the space, a format, and structure to support artists in the exploration of their art in this new space. Providing listeners with a for-podcast live traditional storytelling experience with comforting regularity and the convenience afforded by modern media consumption platforms. In a world of on-demand immediate and non-localised media consumption, live story music needs a new platform; we believe that the Song Stories podcast is that platform. (The napkin pitch for this project has been archived here. With our first group huddle we made our first outing of project planning; we had a vision for this podcast, but who were our target audience and what would they want? We immediately jumped into cold interviews (with people in corridors, uni foyers, and even on trains) and initiated an online target audience survey in order to start gaining some valuable insights. To our delight a grand total of 108 people filled in our podcast survey! ...and we even bagged a nice wide geographical spread (thanks to Reddit!) with people from South America, North America, Europe, and Asia taking the time to fill out our survey. Here is a rundown of some of the stats:

Also, a summary of responses to our open questions, and face to face interviews, were pulled into this digest document here. But the following excerpt from this digest, in particular, caused us to scramble for the emergency brake cord, and pull it HARD - let's see if you can spot why... Why do they listen to podcasts? - Like the general chat. - Able to be engaged whilst multitasking. - Everyone wants to hear a story. - Not a massive music fan. - They’re free. Yep. That's right. Amongst the top 5 responses we'd seen, 'not a massive music fan' was a fairly common trait of podcasts listeners. Which puts us in an interesting position... y'know... for SONG Stories. This absolutely doesn't mean that this podcast shouldn't exist! ...but the slant required to generate appeal amongst podcast listeners would need to reflect these findings. To briefly benchmark this against other successful podcasts - the highly popular Welcome To Nightvale has done well to broach the issue of music placement in podcasts. With its cult-like following and persisting listenership it safe to say the fans of Nightvale are absolutely in this for the deep-seated narrative, world lore, and the characters (the dream of any producer or worldbuilder is to end up with a wiki page for your creation on Fandom right?!). However, the long-standing feature "...and now the weather" has provided independent music artists with a platform within a podcast that slots beautifully into the show's format - a sequencing that feels seamless, but doesn't mask or dilute the featured music either... it's there, and it's there as it should be. The interesting part is that many of the tracks that have found their way into this podcast have become well-known fan favorites. With this, we can see that musicians can indeed successfully utilise long-form podcasts to present music to new audiences - an audience made up of people who, as we can now see, are commonly known to describe themselves as  'not a massive music fan'. Is podcasting a gateway for musicians to win over new audiences? When it's done right, it looks like it certainly can be. From this final round of reflections, we assemble the most recent blueprint for the format of the podcast. The ratio of chat to music had now been skewed in a way that definitely challenged our initial assumptions, but now seems better suited to the wants of our target audiences as per our survey and interview findings; that of more chat, and less music. Song Stories would now dedicate most of its runtime to personable, relatable, fun conversations, then, leading into the backstory of the song, and finally leading to the performance of the song at the apex of the podcast. On Thursday we managed to secure The Rogue Fox Coffee House in Newport, South Wales, as our public venue for the recording of the pilot episode of Song Stories. Making use of this warm, comfortable, and intimate public space, we specifically arranged the room without a 'stage', making sure to place the performer within the circle of audience members. This helped to create a campfire-hearth-like arrangement designed to foster loose conversation between the performer, host, and audience members. This was an effort to break live music and even live podcasting conventions by removing the feeling or illusion of any barriers or walls between the audience and the performer. This was to be a social space. The venue was sympathetically mic'd up with this guiding principle in mind as well and featured a non-invasive mic for the performer, and room mics for everything else, to generate an inclusive 'room' sound for any conversations captured throughout the recording. ...and that was that! The final edit of our pilot podcast for Song Stories was in the can, and it's something that we're all actually quite proud of!  The podcast itself can now be found over at www.songstories.club  >As part of the closing evaluation of this micro project - moving forwards we identified ways in which this podcast endeavor could be honed, sustained, and scaled. The sourcing of small suitable venues on a podcast by podcast basis would not be the most efficient way to scale this into a major project. Instead, a process of batch serialisation would need to take place, with a run of 5-6 half-hour podcasts being captured during each 3-hour live audience recording. With a lineup of 5-6 guests performing in each episode, resulting in 3 months of bi-weekly podcast releases. ...and this is something we're strongly considering! We'll see how the pilot goes down with everyone, but the hunger to keep Song Stories going is riding high with everyone indeed. But for now, this concludes our group micro-project, and I have to say, I'm already feeling very humbled by this refreshing reminder of the power of human-centred design and what can happen when you allow your vision to be molded by needs and the individuals you are targetting your work at - because I really do feel that this project had become something rather interesting as a result.

[dystopialiving]

Case Study #11: Meta Media

Some background:

Meta-media is, as near as I can tell from a very cursory Google search, a term that I’m coining for the sake of this blog.

Seems fair.

The same concept has been touched on by some writers under the terminology of recaps and recap culture, but that analysis in my opinion doesn’t capture the complete nature of the issue. Probably because most other pop culture outlets don’t operate from the premise that we’re living in an inescapable hellscape of our own making.

I’m not sure why, because I’m having a blast here.

Anyhow! Meta-media is media whose sole purpose is to revisit other (most often contemporary) previously-consumed pieces of media, typically in the form of podcasts, television, or streaming video.

You’re likely already familiar with at least one piece of meta-media. Examples include Talking Dead, The West Wing Weekly, Watch the Thrones, and Here to Make Friends.

Media about media is nothing new, as the long history of film and literary criticism, digests and the like attests. However, meta-media is distinct from these other historical forms in that it expects the viewer or listener to have already consumed the primary piece of media in order to engage in the meta-level consumption.

In other words, you’ll read a film review to help you decide if you want to spend your time watching the film in question, and you’ll read Soap Opera Digest to catch up on the episodes you missed, but Talking Dead is not a show you watch if you missed The Walking Dead. It’s a show you spend your time watching if and only if you just spent the last hour of your life watching The Walking Dead. And you don’t listen to The West Wing Weekly to decide whether or not you want to start watching The West Wing. It’s only coherent if you’ve already watched the show.

Whereas historical media about media was created to save you time, meta-media is created to compound the amount of time you spend consuming. So not only do you have to contend with a truly overwhelming amount of primary media, you’ve now got to make sure you’re up on all your hippest recaps as well. 

Meta-media is coming for every goddamn minute we have.

The Dystopia:

There’s nothing inherently bad about media consumption, and there’s no shortage of media that provides opportunities for personal enrichment—It’s when we reach overconsumption, and in particular overconsumption of the types of media that don’t provide personal enrichment, that problems begin to arise. Speaking of a rise: 

Source

That’s right—Americans now spend more than 11 hours each day consuming media of one form or another, and that number is rising. That’s nearly ⅔ of all waking hours (factoring in the less-than recommended 6.8 hours of sleep per night the average American gets).

Frustratingly, the meta-media problem is further compounded by how serialization of media has changed with the advent of streaming video. It is only very recently that media creators expect viewers to consume, for example, every episode of a television series. Even up until the early 2000s, series-long story arcs didn’t require the viewer to consume even the majority of a series’ episodes to be comprehensible, and important plot points were often recapped with the expectation that not all viewers were able to keep up with essential episodes (see, for example, The X-Files). Now, when entire seasons of television are dumped in a single day and viewers can binge watch over the course of a weekend, every episode is designed to be essential viewing.

Whereas the historical digest format would be even more helpful now, in what can only be called a content glut, we’ve instead moved in the opposite direction. Meta-media not only compels us to watch every episode of a television show, it also compels us to watch or listen to every episode about every episode. 

In pulling this post together, I spent several hours listening to and watching meta-media, and I came away with one predominant thought: I’m never getting those hours of my life back. But it was certainly a learning experience.

I dove into The West Wing Weekly and Here to Make Friends (each hour-long podcasts recapping single episodes of The West Wing and The Bachelor, respectively), Beyond Stranger Things, Talk the Thrones (an hour-plus long live webcast recapping single Game of Thrones Episodes), and Talking Dead.

In terms of the content that most meta-media explores, it tends to live in the world of commentary, but rarely approaches criticism—it’s all far more expository than analytical. Hosts will give surface-level opinions about the primary media’s narrative, and make predictions for future episodes or installments, but rarely do they delve deeper into themes or questions like what a piece of media says about the culture at large. Controversial opinions are almost nonexistent, as if the meta-media exists primarily to validate positive feelings that consumers have about the original piece of media. This characteristic is particularly egregious for meta-media that’s produced by the very same entity that created the primary media.

In a best-case scenario, meta-media will include in its discussion someone who was involved in the production of the primary media to give behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the original product. In other words, you’re basically watching this:  

So, yeah, I’m using “best-case scenario” pretty generously here. It’s derivative, it’s uncreative. It adds very little to the conversation started by the primary media, and it’s really only a simulacrum of a conversation.

Meta-media also pays a very real part in our deepening entrenchment in our own particular content bubbles, in that it does little to open us up to new perspectives or ways of thinking. There are only so many hours in the day, and filling those hours with meta-media leaves less and less room for experiencing novel primary media. In a time when we could stand to learn about as many new things and ways of thinking as possible, it seems borderline irresponsible to consume something that, instead of being about love or acceptance or trauma or family or friggin’ dragons, is just about another show.

But Why?

A defense of meta-media I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances is that consuming it feels a lot like hanging out and chatting with friends. But if that’s the case—why aren’t we just hanging out and chatting with friends? Do they not like the same shows that we do? Are we disappointed that they’re not as witty as our favorite podcast hosts? Or do we just not have the time, what with all the meta-media we’re consuming?

At what point does media consumption become another obligation rather than a real pleasure?

Critically, meta-media lacks the most crucial element that hanging out and chatting with friends grants us: actually voicing our own opinions. Sure, we might have thoughts and feelings upon consuming a particular episode, but if we then immediately follow that with simply dumping professional content creators’ positive opinions in on top, do we even have space to fully form and flesh out our own ideas about media?

It’s like a reverse Two Minutes Hate. Let’s call it 60 Minutes Love.

Assuming we don’t receive a cease-and-desist from the Leslie Stahl fan club:

And there, I think is the real answer to why meta-media has grown so enormously in recent years: More consumption means more advertising dollars, and in terms of effort to both create and consume, meta-media expertly scrapes the bottom of the barrel. It’s a low-budget media format that, at its least complicated, reliably gives its consumers warm and fuzzy feelings. More insidiously, meta media also spurs ironic consumption. Sure, you wouldn’t normally be caught dead watching The Bachelor, but Here to Make Friends is funny, so you’ll watch it on a lark. Congratulations—advertisers don’t care why you’re watching the Bachelor. They got your eyeballs anyway.

Redeeming Qualities:

Particularly given the aforementioned opinions about what it feels like to consume meta-media, I’m not going to deny that plenty of meta-media is entertaining. Most meta-media hosts are deliberately chosen to be funny and engaging, so from a strictly hedonic perspective, meta-media has a role to play on the mindless end of the entertainment spectrum. I certainly understand wanting a break from dense, emotionally or intellectually heavy media.

That’s not to say that meta media is dumb, per se. At its best, it can be witty and occasionally insightful, but what it’s not is intellectually original. It is, by its very nature, derivative. And while I understand the impulse to sometimes just kick back and enjoy something untaxing, there’s so much primary media that could fill that void! Or even non-media choices altogether.

I suppose at best that meta-media can be seen as a manifestation of the completionist impulse that lies at the heart of certain fandoms. If we love something enough, we’re happy to sacrifice novelty for depth, and that’s okay as long as we fully grasp the consequences of that choice. Still, I can’t help but feel that there’s a fundamental difference between A World Of Ice And Fire and Watch The Thrones.

Can we fix it?

The first step to fixing this is to just be honest about what we get out of our favorite piece of meta-media and decide whether or not it’s enriching in a way that’s deserving of our increasingly scarce time. More broadly, though, we also need to work towards dealing with a larger cultural problem in content creation: Talk Show Disorder.

Talk Show Disorder is a problem that manifests itself time after time in the behavior of otherwise extremely talented comedians and performers. When presented with a crossroads in their career, they overwhelmingly make an extremely boring and predictable choice: hosting a talk show (see: Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Ellen DeGeneres, etc. etc.).

These are extremely capable people who could otherwise do just about anything with their time and be successful. Why is their impulse to choose to spend five days a week sitting behind a desk, talking about the things that other people are doing? Is it just good, easy money? Is it the cultural weight we’ve assigned to talk show hosts as authority figures?  Why are so many creators compelled to do something so thoroughly unoriginal? To put it another way:

Meta-media, I think, is a symptom of this larger disorder. The notion that this media format is something to aspire to is embedded deeply enough in the zeitgeist that people are going to continue creating and consuming meta-media until it changes.  

Just as every hour we spend consuming meta-media is an hour not consuming better media, every hour spent creating meta-media is an hour not spent creating primary media. Hopefully, if enough people stopped consuming meta-media, market forces would push content creators away from this form and towards using their intellectual capital on more worthwhile pursuits.

Look—at the end of the day, it’s your life. You can spend it doing whatever you want. But know that just as you vote with your dollar, you also vote with your time. So if, for example, you’re a young white dude who took three weeks of improv classes and is convinced that the best thing you can do with your time is record a combination Ballers/60 Minutes recap podcast called Ballers & Stahlers, maybe do your old pal Kevin a favor and try directing your creative energies elsewhere.

Up next: I may well go a few years without posting again, but hey—America has concentration camps again, so the basic premise of this blog is kind of shot. Maybe we should talk about that soon.