(no subject)

So bandom continues to be my happy place this week, in that way where I'm kind of baffled by the whole thing but can still render myself instantly cheerful by reflecting on Fall Out Boy fanfiction. What's really interesting to me is that I 1) am not musical 2) don't necessarily like any of the bandom music (My Chemical Romance has a certain noisy-fluffy appeal, and I like This Ain't a Scene, and that's about it). I don't know if that's enough for bandomers to never speak to me again, but it's also interesting because that's exactly how I've approached most other fandoms except for Jossverse and Who: I'm a lot more interested in the fanon than the canon, it's just here the canon is actual people living actual lives. And that's weird.

I'm told there's a lot of good meta out there about RPS, the ethical negotiations it entails, how an RPS "character" and "canon" are defined - I haven't read most of it, but hey, if any of y'all have good links, now would certainly be the time. What I think is amazing about bandom, right now, as a subculture (looking at it as a sympathetic outsider) is how much the canon is a product of how the boundaries between Normal People and Famous People get broken down on the internet. Check out blushandrecover's Pete Wentz/Mikey Way manifesto - it's all screencapped away messages and blogspot entries and myspace photos, and I have no clue how much of it is actually primary source and how much of it is people being crazy on the internet but it looks a lot like the detritus the rest of us leave when we move through the online world. I don't know, that's the thing I'm finding both creepy and cool about bandom-era RPS: at least in the fanon, these kids are a lot more like us than anything I've read in before. That's something that I didn't like when I tried reading in bandom a year or two ago, the in-story text messages and Guitar Hero and starting sentences with "dude!" but now I seem to find it charming.

I'm sure that there're many intelligent things to be said, possibly by the kind of people who get paid to hold opinions, about the new definitions of public and private created by the internet, but I actually got distracted halfway through this post by picspam and I think I'm going to end on the decidedly unacademic note of: I thoroughly recommend that above manifesto if you can handle the RPS-ness because sweet scrawny jesus I had no idea that it was physically possible for anyone to be as hot as old-school Mikey Way.