Thoughts on Meta and Seasons

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Thoughts on Meta and Seasons

Inside: Musings on what we watch, what we care about enough to obsess on, and a blatant call for ideas - your links to meta writers, please!


Next week is the unofficial start of summer where I live - a time when my favorite medium is all over the place. Many TV shows are ending (some ’til fall and some forever), mid-season series about to begin. And of course the whole industry is all over the place, too; streaming services drop shows to us ten or thirteen or twenty-three at a time. Some we pick up and put right back down, others make our hearts or our brains sing and we binge watch, maybe, because…wow.

Will there even be a ‘season’ anymore, soon? I’m thinking not so much - but happily I think there *will* always be some new show or other that catches my heart and imagination and makes me want to dig a deeper into the little world it creates. For a while I had started to wonder - show after show came and went and left me with not much beyond ‘meh’ for a reaction. Then Netflix served up S1 of “Halt and Catch Fire.”

I only found it last month and loved it so much I couldn’t stop watching, except for the occasional scene so full of ‘ouch’ that I almost wanted to fast forward. For me that’s a sign I’m done for; when a show is so over the top angsty, painful good that I can barely watch. Yeah, sensitive type. It’s also made me think about searching for a meta writer who is hooked on it, too.

I don’t write meta, but I’ve come to appreciate those who do: People who get a show so thoroughly - its theme, tone, mythology - that they can pick it apart for us and help us see it in new ways.

Reading meta, searching for spoilers or at least hints to what’s next - they’ve made me realize that there are really kind of three kinds of viewers. The ones who watch at a very surface level - who wouldn’t recognize subtext or a ship if it ran them over but who enjoy it just fine anyway. To paraphrase a Tumblr post, what’s that like, to be them? To watch for an hour, move on, and not think about it ’til next week? Tier two is viewer who sees what the show did there - but is also fine confining their interests to the hour that they watch it, with maybe an article on it catching their eye here and there.

Then, there’s the expert - the person who doesn’t see a show, they see a chess game. They not only anticipate the twist, they can explain why it happened and what the implications are for the road ahead. They’re the ones who write meta, and a big thank you to them for their time and patience and that insider perspective, am I right?

What are your definitions of meta? For what fandoms or canon types have you read some great thoughts and analysis? Maybe they're in the form of fan studies articles, analyzing fandom itself or some practice fans engage in?

Do you have a favorite meta writer? Several? If so I’d love to hear about them and get some links. Share in the comments - and if you’re a resident expert on a fandom, please don’t be shy about saying so!

Meta Definition on Fanlore

Meta tag structure on AO3

Metafandom

On symposia: LiveJournal and the shape of fannish discourse by Rebecca Lucy Busker