These are the footnotes for the article Oasis of the Real, which can be found here.
- 4chan’s main forum is of course /b/, the “Random” forum, which can be thought of as the Internet’s primordial ooze (which spawned the now-autonomous hacker group, Anonymous). But there is a whole pile of other, less-infamous boards that produce or collect different content. 4chan.org/fa/ is for fashion discussion, /m/ is for giant robots, /k/ is for guns, and /y/ is for yaoi—illustrated gay sex. /Y/ is interesting because it seems to be a haven for women on 4chan, which is a notoriously hostile boys’ club that treats any “out” female posters as vending machines or scapegoats, sometimes at the consent or encouragement of the women/girls involved.
- Typical imagery in yaoi comes from either extreme end of the spectrum of idealized male bodies, depending on the franchise: Dragonball fan art tends to stick to its source material, a sort of fetishized bodybuilding, with grotesque musculature and ludicrous genitalia bulging from every seam. The more touchy-feely franchises are often treated with wraithlike, almost sexless drawings taken straight from the pages of “boys’ love” comics; willowy, hairless Potters and arch, angular, but equally-smooth Snapes. Not that all Potter fanart is one way, while all DBZ fanart is another—while I am not intimately acquainted with them, I have observed skilled artists producing work in every fandom.
- Henry Jenkins is the father of the Comparative Media Studies field and the man who wrote the book on fandom: Textual Poachers, which I have not read, was published in 1992 is is considered to be the work on fan appropriation of franchised media. He found that the large part of most fandoms was comprised of young-to-middle-aged women.
- Since my first introductions to the TF2 fandom, and particularly TF2chan, a lot of this rigidity has been relaxed, and new rules about niceties introduced by the moderators. Fan artists and writers have also moved much of their work onto personal Tumblr blogs, which are unmoderated. The pool of hopefuls has widened considerably, but the original standards have not slipped much.
- Educated guess. The genders of registered Xbox Live, PSN and Steam accounts are not publicly accessible in bulk.
- Also the single racial minority. Valve lampoons itself for its own tokenism by making him Scottish, although it is important to note that the Demoman was Scottish from the beginning, only becoming black later in the development cycle. According to the development blog, Valve worried that a white Demoman would be too much of a “Groundskeeper Willie”, and wanted something that “broke the cliche”.
- Pyro is voiced by the same actor who does Spy, giving the game’s dramatis personae an interesting Captain Hook/Mr. Darling interior dynamic (in Peter Pan, the same actor traditionally portrays both Captain Hook and Wendy’s father, Mr. Darling, which highlights the pubescent female psychosexual drama in Wendy’s choice between joining the pirates and a Humbertesque father-lover, or going home to her real family). The Pyro is the Spy’s “hard counter”, meaning a class designed specifically to counter the abilities of another. Pyro’s wide swaths of flame can catch Spies who are using their class-based abilities, invisibility (“cloaking”), and disguising as enemy teammembers. This physically harms Spies, but also blows their cover, as the flames are quite visible even when the Spy is not. They are also the only two masked characters, and the only two characters who carry open flame—Spy’s in the form of his mascot, the daemon-like cigarette, a miniaturized faux-flamethrower, which trails him with a thread of smoke wherever he runs. Could the Spy have flame-envy?
- What this means to gay men, if anything, I couldn’t say. I actually haven’t seen much evidence of a strong gay male population on TF2chan, or in other spaces where this material exists, and it’s not my place to speculate about the gay male experience. If you’re out there, let me know. I’d love to hear what you have to say.
- I will be using the pronoun “their” to refer to Pyro, as the character’s official gender is a subject of obfuscation on Valve’s part, and of debate on the part of the fandom.
- A discussion of the Pyro as a representation of racial minority existence, and of disfigurement, will be coming up in a future installment that deals with tropes in TF2 fanfic and fanart.
- Two non-standard weapons, Scout’s Mad Milk and Sniper’s Jarate, have their own response lines as of the time of their release. Both of these can be used on your own teammates to extinguish flames.
- Pyros can injure other Pyros with any weapons, but unlike every other class, Pyros will not continue to burn after the flamethrower is turned away from them, the suit itself being flameproof. Make of that what you will.
- https://www.google.com/search?q=pyro+overpowered&hl=en
- The Pyro is actually a balanced class, due to their short range and normal speed, so the accusations of overpowering are mostly a lot of hot air.
- There is a vocal collection of men who insist on the existence of a “matriarchy” that rules the earth with an iron fist, denying helpless men sex and nurturing, corrupting children, and throwing innocent men in prison with fabricated accusations of rape. They are generally known as “Men’s Rights Activists” and have their own subReddit, as well as numerous forums and blogs.
- The same type of person who would design a white Demoman. This is currently the most-downloaded custom character model for TF2, and has been for a long time.
- This is not Valve’s first foray into the examination of the dualism-puppetry of Player vs. Character. In this easter egg in Half Life 2, a non-player character addresses the puppeteer-player using metaphor: “Your bright face obscures your darker mask. We call you sib, although your mind and meaning are a mystery to us. Far distant eyes look out through yours. Something secret steers us both. We shall not name it. How many are there in you? Whose hopes and dreams do you encompass? Could you but see the eyes inside your own, the minds in your mind, you would see how much we share.” In reaching out to the person “steering” the protagonist Gordon Freeman, and in comparing itself to Freeman, the NPC makes an explicit acknowledgement of the intimate and multifold interactions between game designer and game player, using the proxy of their character-puppets. The narrative of Half Life 2 delves into this relationship further, but that’s for a different article.
