Avrelia was thinking. Run untill it's too late!

[avrelia]

It came to my attention that Buffy fandom has an inordinate amount of lawyers (future, past, and present) in it.

I can think of three possible explanations:

1) I notice them (birds of a father and all that), and they take a prominent position in my mind, but not in reality.
2) The amount of lawyers in the fandom represents proportionally the amount of lawyers among the general population.
3) The fandom attracts freaks of nature.


What is your opinion?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/automatedalice_/]

i'll choose C. i really think that if you took a huge general survey of fandoms you'd find that there are a high percentage of BtVS fans with advanced degrees, weird degrees, or "weird" occupations. & i think you'd find a large number of people in the IT field as trek fans. i think you're a lot more likely to have fans with humanities/liberal arts degrees as BtVS fans than as trek fans, just because of the nature of the storytelling. arcs, etc. & i think the arcs & the weird backgrounds, etc. connect well & that's why you get the high degree of obsessiveness/rabidity in BtVS fandom. we have a thriving community of people still talking after a show is over & the narrative of those conversations is a lot deeper than arguing about farpoint or saying "wouldn't it be cool if captain picard had done such-&-such..."

& yeah, i'm polarizing fandom & making sweeping generalizations about trek fans. all i know is that the viewing parties i've been to are radically different. it's OK to argue with ME, but if you argue with gene roddenberry's construction of morality, you're making an affront to the entire universe.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

hmm, I would say, yes the third choice generally is more true – BtVS fandom attracts and keeps fans who are willing and able to discuss at long length story arcs, character developments, and construction of morality, etc.

But I, of course, tend to note lawyer-types in particular in the fandom, so in a way, choice #1 also applies to me.

[gobi-rex.livejournal.com]

Hmm... this is something I've wondered about for some time. I noticed that the BtVS fandom has a high percentage of people with degrees in humanities/liberal arts. I myself studied a rather technical (i.e. mathematical) social science and I sometimes feel at a disadvantage because of that. Actually, there was a time I could have gone either way, but in the end I chose the more technical field, believing that I could always read other books in my free time. Which I did, but it's not the same as formally studying literature and etc.

I admire doyle_sb4 (who's a terrific fic writer and a brilliant physics brain) and paratti (also, a terrific writer and who, I believe, had economics training as well), who seem to successfully utilize both sides of their brain. For me, it's a constant struggle for control, to use the left side of my brain for professional endeavors and to feed my right brain with humanities and etc. and not feel like I'm betraying either one.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

I think humanitarian education makes it easier to discuss some topics that come up in the BtVS/AtS fandom. But supposedly other specialties could provide different perspectives – and sometimes they do, I only haven’t seen a legal perspective yet, and I am not worried about it, either.

Anyway, I am using the whole pool of all the useless knowledge in my head to think about BtVS, rarely in connection to my professional interests. (Can you believe I have half-written post about similarities between Angel and Ilia Muromets, and Wesley as Dobrynya Nikitich?) Crazy.

[gobi-rex.livejournal.com]

(Can you believe I have half-written post about similarities between Angel and Ilia Muromets, and Wesley as Dobrynya Nikitich?)

Very cool! I love AtS, but I don't have much insight into the Angel/Wes dynamic... otherwise I'd help you. Do you have a candidate for Alyosha? Damn, now I'm tempted to read that again.

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

No, I don’t. I tried to find someone who fits Alyosha’s image, but then I realized it wouldn’t work. May be I noticed the parallels exactly because I haven’t read byliny for a very long time. But with Angel and Wes it sprang to mind unexpectedly, and fit nicely (allowing the difference between Old Russian epic poems and American TV series). I went as far as bringing a book from Moscow about byliny to see why these similarities might work, of course, now I have no time to read it.