Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture is a 1992 nonfiction book by Henry Jenkins, notable as one of the first academic studies of fandom. Jenkins rejects notions of fans as social misfits and mindless consumers, exploring in detail the fans' society and the relationships between shows, producers, and fans.
Tropes covered in this work:
- Fanfic Fuel: Discussed. According to Jenkins, popular fanfic topics can come out of a series when it ends in a way the fandom dislikes or finds unsatisfactory.Alien Nation ended on a cliff-hanger; George Lucas completed only one of a promised three Star Wars trilogies note ; Beauty and the Beast denied fans the resolution of the Vincent-Catherine romance; Blake's 7's fourth season concluded the series with the apparent deaths of its major characters.
- Feminist Fantasy: Two case studies examining Star Trek: The Original Series fanfiction:
- One of the objectives of Leslie Fish's The Weight series, from the 1970s, was to provide the main cast with female counterparts who were every bit as competent as they were.
- Jane Land's "Demeter" puts Uhura and Christine Chapel in command of an all-female landing party on a voyage to a lesbian separatist space colony; their adventures not only provide these characters with a chance to demonstrate their professional competency but also to question the patriarchal focus and attitudes of The Original Series and its male protagonists. Land characterizes her project as rescuing Chapel from "an artificially imposed case of foolishness":"Try to think objectively for a moment about what we know of Christine Chapel's background, education, accomplishments... and you will come up with a far more interesting character than she was ever allowed to be. The Christine Chapel I found when I thought about her was neither wimp nor superwoman, but, I hope, an intelligent, complex, believable person."
- Short Run in Peru: The practice for Beauty and the Beast is discussed using an anecdote about fans on the United States/Canada border recording French-dubbed episodes of the series that aired a few days (or weeks) earlier than the U.S. stations, and the women at the viewing party "shouting out" lines they understood from old high-school French classes.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Jenkins gives this reaction a sympathetic view. Documenting the opinion of a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan called Junius:Your favourite character has been "promoted" and (they hope) forgotten; your second favourite character's role has been considerably reduced and his characterization changed; the people who look like you have either been made into a caricature or removed from the bridge altogether, and stuck in unattractive costumes as well (I know that's the division color. I'm sorry, but mustard is simply not a good color on black people). The weight of the show has been placed on an occasionally cute but minor character; the writers aren't doing anything with the two remaining characters, who get less interesting as time goes on - and there's a baby on the bridge where an adult should be. Given all that, might you not maybe possibly be just a little, tiny bit upset?
