Fan Fiction

This week we looked at two episodes of Lost and were asked to read Craig Saper's essay "A Fan's Paranoid Logic," as well as some fan forums. After reading Saper's essay I immediately thought about comic con and all of the other conventions that occur and it made me think about how devoted people can be towards the shows, movies, etc. in which they read or watch. It got me thinking about how many people may just be devoted fans, but there are always those select few who take their fandom to an extreme, people such as stalkers. This week has been really interesting for me because I am a fan of Lost, but also because I am learning about fan culture and it's relationship to the television industry right now in another class. In an article I read for that class it talked about Lost and how it uses the obscured television strategy. This strategy is the one in which writers and producers expect viewers and fans to come up with their own ideas. This is where reading the fan forums comes in, because these forums allow fans to communicate with one another, as well as the show creators, about their ideas of what is happening on the island or what they think should become a storyline. Before taking my Television Studies course I never really thought that creators and writers looked at fan forums, but after reading articles and from the discussions in class, I've learned that a lot of times they do listen. This just makes me wonder if any of the situations on Lost have come up because of fan ideas.