Queer fandoms: The place where he inserted the blade

By Sophie Camire 

Finding parallels between different shows, movies, and other fannish texts is a popular and rewarding practice in fandom. Multifandom vids are fan-made videos carefully threading clips from different pieces of media and setting them to music; they often serve as visual theses that summarize and synthesize fandom discourse around media in a similar genre (Freund, 2018). To illustrate, the fandoms of the T.V. shows Killing Eve, Hannibal, and Interview with the Vampire have a great overlap of fans who often like to compare the three using practices like multifandom vids. Fandom discourse around these three shows tends to center themes of queer monstrosity; this queer monstrosity triumvirate all feature an endearing villain with camp sensibilities who seduces their deeply human narrative foil into murderous debauchery (Radha4790, 2021). I suppose what draws fans to these shows is queer identification with the perception of being labelled as a monster in society; if one is perceived as a monster, what is more sickly satisfying than to become the monster society already sees you as? Moreover, these shows allow audiences to see someone be loved, not despite the fact that they are monsters, but precisely because they are monsters - something that is often lacking in mainstream gay media that touts respectability politics. By reflecting on my own fan-vid of the “big three” of queer monstrosity, I suggest that multifandom vids make intertextual links that create new conceptions of queerness.

Each of these three shows alone can be interpreted as representations of queer monstrosity but it is the intertextual linking of all three that creates a larger statement about trends in media. In vids, intertextual links can be made using film techniques such as graphic match cuts, which implicitly show a connection between two different scenes sharing similar imagery. For example, at the start of my vid I used a graphic match cut to show each of the “villain” characters gently caressing the face of the protagonists to show that the villains, who are usually violent, share a unique intimacy with their protagonists. Connecting these three shows strengthens the argument for this kind of interpretation of the shows on their own, which is in line with the theory that the main purpose of fan edits is to become a part of the storytelling (Freund, 2018).

The other intertextual component of vidding – the music – helps to explain the visuals and vice versa, which changes or queers the meaning of both. Music is a popular choice of fanfiction authors and vidders alike to serve as an intermedial lens through which a character’s inner emotional life is expressed (Lamerichs, 2018; Freund, 2018). In my vid, I use the song “The place where he inserted the blade” to make the toxically codependent nature of the characters’ relationships more salient and to connect their violence to their romance as the song contains motifs like burning, knives, and feeling lost yet being chained together (Black Country, New Road, 2022). The song explains the visuals in that it gives audience a sense of what emotion they should be feeling while watching the vid or it can explain what characters possibly do not or cannot say explicitly in the show (Freund, 2018). Yet the visuals can also queer the meaning of the song; before putting the song in the video, the song “The place where he inserted the blade” could have been about any kind of relationship but placing it in the context of these shows gave it a queer specificity. The meaning of the song was poached and repurposed so that lyrics such as “show me where to tie the other end of this chain” became about my argument that to live a life outside of heteronormative society (or to live as vampires, or murderers, or contract killers) is often to become toxically codependent with anyone who can see past - or even love - one’s perceived flaws (Freund, 2018). However, the meaning may be more obvious to fans of the shows because the viewer has to be able to understand the cultural context of both the song and the shows.

Access to technology, an educated background, and the availability of free time pre-supposes the ability to make such intertextual links and vids, which influences what kinds of discourses are reflected in vids. Vids like mine can be made with a specific audience in mind that I assume will be able to deduce my meaning from just the quick cuts of clips and the musical cues (Jenkins, 1995, as cited in Freund, 2018). My narrative on queer monstrosity may be a reflection of my own perception of what it means to be queer, which may only be relatable to a similar demographic of white, university-educated queer women. The fandom discourse that influenced my vid may also consist of primarily voices from that demographic because people of colour are often left out of North American centered fandoms (Bury, 2014; Stitch, 2022). My vid does not account for different perspectives on the show involving racial power dynamics (in the cases of Killing Eve and Interview with the vampire); vids in general might be problematic in downplaying themes of racial inequity present in the text in favour of romantic plots (Floegel, 2022). Thus, although vids can be political and they can try to communicate a new conception of queerness, they are perhaps limited by their medium and the culture of vidding which centres slash vids that are often too short to capture complicated discourse about subjects such as race and privilege.