Gilmore Girls: A Fan Culture Fan cultures offer more engagement and interaction with a particular narrative. People within the fan cultures of television shows often participate in gatherings such as “watch party” rituals as well as acts of ostension that allow them to interact more deeply with the narrative. Fan culture members often have collections of memorabilia, participate in fan conventions, participate in discussions about their feelings involving the particular thing they are a fan of, and sometimes even take terms from the shows they are a devoted fan of for use in their everyday lives. A fan culture differs greatly from the casual fan, and that definitely proves to be the case with the Warner Brother’s popular 2000’s television
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The Warner Brothers Studio Tour allows you to visit the set of the fictional town square and house of the two main characters, Lorelai and Rory. This allows fans to further interact with the narrative and is also a form of ostension through acting out the narrative by walking around the hometown of the fictional characters featured on the television series. Here you are able to take photographs in Stars Hollow, something that likely would not be of any interest and would just seem like an ordinary television set to someone who had not seen the …show more content…
The article Star Terk, Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching goes into discussing Star Trek fan fiction by stating that, "Their underground status allows fan writers the creative freedom to promote a range of different interpretations of the basic program material and a variety of reconstructions of marginalized characters and interests." (Jenkins, 1988. p.54) This idea is not limited to the Star Trek fan culture and I have definitely found it to be true within the Gilmore Girls fan culture as well. Throughout my research I have found numerous examples of fan fiction using the Gilmore Girls original characters and interests but delving into different possible situations for these characters to experience that differ from those experienced in the show itself. This ties into the article mentioning how fan fiction allows fan writers that sense of creative freedom to create their own situations while using already established fictional characters within an already established fictional universe. This idea of fan fiction is linked to fan culture as opposed to the casual fan because casual fans do not spend their time writing works of fiction regarding the characters within a television series. The article also mentions “Indeed, many fan writers characterize themselves as "repairing the damage" caused by the programs inconsistent and often demeaning treatment of its female characters.” (Jenkins, 1988 p.40)
The Warner Brothers Studio Tour allows you to visit the set of the fictional town square and house of the two main characters, Lorelai and Rory. This allows fans to further interact with the narrative and is also a form of ostension through acting out the narrative by walking around the hometown of the fictional characters featured on the television series. Here you are able to take photographs in Stars Hollow, something that likely would not be of any interest and would just seem like an ordinary television set to someone who had not seen the …show more content…
The article Star Terk, Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching goes into discussing Star Trek fan fiction by stating that, "Their underground status allows fan writers the creative freedom to promote a range of different interpretations of the basic program material and a variety of reconstructions of marginalized characters and interests." (Jenkins, 1988. p.54) This idea is not limited to the Star Trek fan culture and I have definitely found it to be true within the Gilmore Girls fan culture as well. Throughout my research I have found numerous examples of fan fiction using the Gilmore Girls original characters and interests but delving into different possible situations for these characters to experience that differ from those experienced in the show itself. This ties into the article mentioning how fan fiction allows fan writers that sense of creative freedom to create their own situations while using already established fictional characters within an already established fictional universe. This idea of fan fiction is linked to fan culture as opposed to the casual fan because casual fans do not spend their time writing works of fiction regarding the characters within a television series. The article also mentions “Indeed, many fan writers characterize themselves as "repairing the damage" caused by the programs inconsistent and often demeaning treatment of its female characters.” (Jenkins, 1988 p.40)