A while back I was asked on curioscat, a question that cooked down to am I problematic because I enjoy media that is problematic? To that, at the time, I said:

The simple answer is no.

There’s this term I’ve been using a lot since I learned about it because I feel like people should know it exists. It’s a term that you won’t use and you don’t need to use but it’s absolutely a term you should know exists, because it intersects with your life in a way that you may not even realise, certainly if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog.

That term is fanagement.

Fanagement is a term that was used first by the BBC, describing a strategy they had in mind for what was at the time their upcoming companion series to the Dr Who relaunch, Torchwood. This was around 2005, and yes, Torchwood was fifteen years ago, I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you this timey wimey thing.

Point is that when Torchwood was in development, the BBC were noticing the way that the fans and community surrounding their products behaved, and were already grappling with an established idea called fantagonism – where narratives about the way the shows were made or the way people engaged with a show could result in pushback or even protracted campaigns against their work. The notional argument was that fans had expectations and opinions, and discursive hubs where they behaved and operated, and rather than ignore them or treat them as ‘the outside’ (sometimes called the rat cage!), to take on board what they’re talking about, or anticipating, and implement ideas from fans to strengthen their relationship to the work.

The idea was that while this practice could have results, they didn’t want to just do it with Dr Who – a famously volatile property mostly renowned for being able to spin attention out of budgets comparable to a packet of crisps – and instead, the plan was to use Torchwood as a test for it.

Now, I’m not a Torchwood fan or a Dr Who fan, so I can’t say how well these things worked from the fan perspective, but I can tell you that according to the internal documents boy howdy it went well, so much so that they distributed the paper on Fanagement and started trying to implement the practice widely.

The results of what they wanted fanagement to do was keep a hard core of engaged audiences in ways that metrics could track – so reddit posts, twitter activity, trending on social media platforms. Interestingly, when this discussion comes up, there’s mention of creation of fan works, but not what platforms they tracked – but given the nature of the internet, I have to assume that this means the BBC had someone whose job was to read all the Torchwood porn to see if there was some kind of consistent fan trend to follow in all of it.

Oh yes.

They’re reading our fanfics.

This got a lot of utility too – fan creators that showed promise and ability in the context of the work could be recruited to the BBC’s writing crew, ideas they made that were shared and communal (so not just ripping off someone’s idea, but something lots of people came up with in a deniable way) were harvested, all that stuff. A new Dr Who theme gets implemented, composed by a fan, and they get to meet Peter Capaldi, it’s all a neat symbiosis.

I don’t have it in me to be too mad about the BBC doing this, by the way, in no small part because they’re a publically owned media group. Sure, they’re making profit selling Dr Who stuff, but that’s part of public funds, and so an integration with a public community makes complete sense to me. They wanted to do their best with a beloved fan project, and they were studying the way things got made, and the result was this idea, this term: Fanagement.

Let me be clear, that even as this idea goes places, someone was going to write this down. This idea is not unique alchemy or some poisonous notion. This is something written about by experts in fandom studies! But now that utility, that idea, is being used by people who aren’t using it to guide the production of a beloved franchise of a half-century’s life that has been sustained from time to time by the sheer will of fans wanting to never forget it.

The ideas though have since become accepted as general practice, and the result we’re getting is creating weird things. Weird things like Overwatch, an entire fanagement project that wants to create a non-canon, a sort of big narrative space where you can kinda assume things happen, sorta, or the things they know you like aren’t going to be contradicted, and where most of what’s going on is pure marketing air. Everything is deniable, nothing is written down for good, and it’s all just in motion enough to keep the fans spinning and making all that lovely engagement.

This is something that has struck at Westworld – where a story beat was guessed by a Redditor ahead of time, and they rewrote a chunk of the early show to avoid that, because the idea they should surprise everyone was more important than the idea that they’d clearly laid groundwork that someone could deduce from. Game of Thrones was driven in its last season heavily by trying to implement fanagement strategies, wanting to ensure that everyone got happy by everything they did, and surprise everyone and land the few plot points they knew for sure would happen and in the process created an enormous, long, loud, wet fart of a story beat that, I want to remind everyone again: was bad.

Wrestling, by the way, has had this phenomenon for a while, and there’s a whole book’s worth of content on how wrestling is changed by an attempt to ‘include’ the fans who think they know better (often known as ‘smarks’). Oh, and right now there’s a wrestling fan composing a tweet about how that’s an oversimplification and I know it is, but that’s generally what happened. And the results were kinda WCW.

What I guess I’m saying is if you think that lately, companies have been doing a lot of ‘hey, we get you, fans’ stuff, they are. They get us. They are paying someone to get us.

And those people don’t get us, but gosh, they can fake it well.

Martens are a grouping of small, fuzzy predatory animals that populate most of the continents in the northern hemisphere. They’re in that category of animals that are uncommon enough that our major point of comparison in European culture is to compare them to things they’re not like, so the comparisons tend to be ‘like a cat, but.’

It’s possible that you’re aware enough of animals to know about ferrets or skunks, and those are the better starting place to talk about martens. They are mustelids, the category of carnivorous mammals that includes otters, badgers, wolverines, and weasels. If you’re curious about how we tell ‘mustelidity’ in things, well, these days we do it with cladistics, rather than just squinting at the animal’s bits, but there are some common traits. Mustelids tend to have elongated bodies, short legs, round ears, and thick fur, which is also why probably the most high profile mustelid is famous for being separated from its fur – the mink.

Martens are forest-dwelling predators that seem to thrive well enough in spaces where there may be territory but not necessarily a lot of space. If you go to a Russian taiga, you’ll find martens there – unable to make large, elaborate burrows in the cold ground like a Badger’s set, they instead run around along tree branches, jumping and bouncing and holing up in small hollows in trees, using the way their bodies are flexible and bendy to make comfortable resting places in ridiculous positions.

We once kept ferrets, and they had this same trait – you’d sometimes find one, curled up in a loop, feet in the air, nose to butt, able to make themselves into a sort of fanged donut any time you left them with something to nestle into. Martens live in these environments by predating on smaller mammals like mice and shrews, hunting birds – which they can even do by springing into the air from branches – and stealing eggs from nests and honey from hives.

Martens are currently ‘least concern’ level of endangered, and they are very cute. They are not domesticated and it is not advised you approach them if you see one in the wild.

Why am I talking about this?

Because it’s MAR-10.

I time to time do flag threads on twitter, which are great for the format of twitter, which is fantastic for the framing of ‘here is a picture, now I will be mean to that picture, and as you scroll, I will do it again.’ Blog posts about flags tend to be a bit more laborious, because I feel the need to provide contextual explanation, which, you know, that’s not a bad thing, but it does change the tone.

If you’ve paid attention to me talk about flags, yeah, a bunch of this is going to sound familiar, but I feel the need to make a primer.

When you start to talk about a problem in a group, it’s very easy to start making concessions for that group. In the context of the US State Flags, there are fifty of these suckers, and fifty of anything means it’s just naturally, intuitively easy to think ‘oh hey, surely this isn’t better or worse than that.’ The problem that arises is that when it comes to flag design principles, there are three very simple rules that you can follow.

• No text
• No fine detail
• Limited colour palette – three to five colours

And for Americans, we can add a new extra rule:

• No confederate flag stuff

Now, is South Carolina’s floppy mop better than Washington’s woodcut? yeah, probably, but it’s still a fine detailed flag. Having fewer mistakes than the other doesn’t mean it doesn’t have mistakes. And these mistakes are the kind of mistakes that simply gets a design a failure. Go back, start again.

A lot of these flags weren’t designed with these things in mind – in fact if you dig into the history of a lot of them they weren’t designed by people who make flags at all, mostly being the result of state lawmakers who wanted to try and leave a mark on the state, or graduate some existing element of the state’s iconography into the big leagues. Very few of them have been seriously reviewed and a number of them are influenced more by Chamber of Commerce members in the state than anything else, which if you don’t know them, they’re kind of like social clubs for local corporations. Not great.

If you take this list of sins, and remove every single flag that breaks one of the rules, this is what you get:

Out of 50 state flags, there are seven that don’t break one of those major rules, by featuring either confederate imagery, text, fine detail or a too-deep colour palette.

This is a problem that gets worse. When I did my flag thread by city flags in America, I had to invent a new category for flags that weren’t just bad because they broke one of those rules, but because in addition to the rule breaking, they broke those rules to create something awful. There were a whole category of flags in the US like Belen’s old flag:

This thing looks like it was made in Corel Draw. It’s not just fine detail but it’s fine detail you need a clipart library to replicate.

This is what I mean when I talk about American state and city flags being bad: So many of them are so bad they need multiple categorical levels of types of failure to make sure I can convey that I’m not just being randomly mean to things that don’t meet my personal aesthetics, but that they are doing things that push them into the realm of inventing new mistakes.

Meanwhile if you’re curious, hey, Belen updated their flag, to this:

This flag is better, but it still breaks the rules.

Bonus: It’s being protested because it’s promoting religious iconography.

cool flag work, Belen.