there's a mountain here not coming to mohammad

So, the newest edition of the Transformers comic came out and as usual it's full of potboilery melodrama.  That's not a judgment statement, or rather, it is if you understand how much I love Victorian potboilery melodrama. Which may, now that I think of it, be informing the dissatisfaction that prompted this post.

Because the response (the people I watch on twitter, tumblr and plurk are predominantly female, but I don't want to make a gender statement about this) is overwhelmingly of the 'ZOMG MY FEELS' variety, judgments on how cute a character is, and how devastated they'll be if a character dies.

What strikes me about these responses is twofold. First, the generic, almost compulsory behavior of it, and second, the way they foreground the reader's emotional response. 

There's a sort of competitiveness, a 'first!' in fan culture. The first response to a post, the first response post to a comment. It's just how it is.  And every Wednesday (for comics) or Friday (for the tv show in my canon), people flood social media with their response.

It's curious to note the importance of individuality in this (which seems sort of ironically contradictory, considering how generic and samey the responses are): people have to make their own plurk, their own tweet, their own post, instead of commenting on another's.

The generic nature of the responses is also interesting (yet strangely tedious).  There's no serious analysis of plot or character or world: discussion is all surface and emotional.  There's not even any serious analysis of the emotional response--the 'feels' have taken over.  Part of me wonders, but can only speculate, if this is a sign of a growing inarticulacy about emotional state or is it unnecessary to go beyond feels and reaction .gif.

I'm one of the people who don't like 'feels'. It's too generic for me, some sort of shorthand for 'physically powerful emotional response' which I get, but I just..I prefer nuance, I prefer complexity. My 'feels' may be different from your 'feels' and the same generic label elides that, making responses entirely bland. I'd love a 'this made me angry, this made me sad, this made me worry' which I could compare with my own, learn new things, engage in a discussion (why did that make you mad?) but 'glass case of emotion' doesn't....really open that door for me. There is no way to engage, no way to interact on anything beyond a surface level.

The second part is the foregrounding of the reader's emotional response.  If a text hits their 'feels' it is judged as good. And it seems many fans stop at 'feels'.  Not only do they not discuss their own emotional response beyond that, but discussion afterwards seems to focus only on potential future emotional issues.

NOW, I think I need to state this at least at some point. I am not fandom policing.  And I don't, honestly, imagine these responses are that much different than those Victorian readers of serialized fiction. That emotional response, after all, is what's going to make them plunk down coin of the realm for the next issue, right? But I admit I find the parade aspect of it, the nonrelational aspect of it, to be interesting. 

But I admit to dissatisfaction, because it's not, it's never been, the kind of discussion I want to have in fandom and with fandom. I want to talk about gender issues, worldbuilding issues, political issues, character issues. I want to talk about, well, anything OTHER than my emotional response.

Of course, because I am a child of the Academy.  Feels don't have a place in your senior thesis or dissertation. 

I guess...what I really want, what is at the root of my frustration with the ZOMG FEELSstorm, is that there is no place for the kind of discussion I do want to have. There's no cool-down let's talk about X going on.  I could, of course (and have) write conference papers about it, but those are to strangers, most of whom are unfamiliar with the canon, and don't have the referential points of contact to really *discuss* back, to make me think or challenge my conclusions.

Which is what I want, it's what I enjoy.  I don't enjoy, I can't enjoy a response that is, well, so thoughtless, so emotional. 

I know, I know, write it yourself. I just would like to hear OTHER people's takes on the issues, other people's ideas, for a change.