By Any Other Name
In response to Lori’s blog on BNF’s
Trekdom is the oldest show fandom, dating back to the successful drive to keep the show on the air for a third season, and the unsuccessful one for a fourth. I don’t know that it’s IDIC that keeps Trek fans more polite than the newer, more rabid fandoms. I’d guess it was science fiction itself. In my experience, S’s have little patience for sci-fi of any sort, not even with Seven of Nine parading around in a catsuit, so the Trek population is heavily slanted towards the N’s, which cuts down on personality conflicts. Sometimes BNF is a matter of personality, too.
It’s dangerous, with non-Trekkers lurking nearby, to talk of BNF’s-by-merit. Let us say that all BNF’s deserve their big names, but that it is not always for fic that they’ve gotten them. Consider the idea that Big Fame can result merely from participation in fandom as a social activity, rather than from the stories themselves. It is, for people like myself, a very strange concept, but one which I’ve heard more than once and must take into account. I think Lori touches on this phenomenon when she talks of BNF’s by PR, of the effect of Big Names in author’s notes, and of Big Fans acting important and authorative, but she seems to believe it still has something to do with advertising your fic. I disagree - it’s not the fic that spreads by these means, but the Big Name itself.
Of course, all BNF’s write, or have at some point written, fanfic. It’s a rite of passage, but it’s not necessarily the source of their fame. Like a presidential candidate who was, technically, in the armed forces for the last relevant war but spent his tour of duty behind a desk somewhere or reporting for a military newspaper, the BNF’s actual fic may be merely nominal. Or she may still be cranking out the fic, but in a forum which will never be critical thereof. (One cannot overestimate the importance of quantity in fandom.) Thus, someone who has produced quality stories at a steady rate for years can be thrown over by voracious fans for a newbie with the energy to flood the market with average fic. To see a BNF-by-fic lose, say, a fanfic contest to a BNF-by-potlatch can be a disheartening thing to those who still think fandom ought to be all about the fic.
Archivists, blogs and rec sites aren’t common in Trekdom, so the idea that fame can derive from something that isn’t even there comes hard to geeky old-school fans who grew up on TOS, such as yours truly. One sees more of fame by social factors in the pairing lists, but I think that in order to find persona trumping oeuvre on a large scale, you’d have to look to other fandoms. If you’d rather not see that sort of thing, it’s best to stick to Trek. There are far stranger things in out there in fandom than our little sock puppets.