Analysis Of Veronica Mars Fandom

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Credited as the first “save our show” campaign was the 1968 letter writing campaign to NBC on behalf of Star Trek. Since then there have been many other fan campaigns, not just to save shows but also to influence story-lines, but what exactly are the limits of fan power? Through the Veronica Mars fandom this can be explored and answered because there have been many fan campaigns within the fandom. These campaigns ran the gamut, from sending 10,000 Mars Bars to the CW to keep the show on the air to the “ship” campaign on behalf of Logan and Veronica to the creator-organized Kickstarter campaign to finance a Veronica Mars movie. This leads us to the next set of questions, what was the motivation and experience for fans participating in the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign and how was the text of the show/movie influenced by fans?
The most cited works on fan studies that I came across in my readings is Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture by Henry Jenkins, who at the time of publication was an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published over twenty-years ago it misses out on the massive explosion of online fandom and internet sites like fan fiction.net but it is a great ethnographic exploration of fandom. Focusing on popular programs like Star Trek, Starsky and Hutch, and Twin Peaks Jenkins details how fans have mined these materials for the basis of their fan fiction stories, fan videos, songs and have constructed a social community around them. Going beyond the popular media stereotypes of fans as socially awkward people with no lives, Jenkins argues that fans do have a “life”, and that fans are “poachers” who borrow from material to construct their own conte...

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...ted in Kickstarter. Academically the Veronica Mars fandom has been left unexamined but in wake of the Kickstarter, it is really an area of study in need of further exploration. The books published within the last twelve months are the ones with the most relevancy to my research topic because they mention the newest online social networking sites which is where communication between fans and content creators has really grown. Although, even in Duffett’s book Twitter is only mentioned three times and Tumblr and Cafe Press are not mentioned at all. The Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign was announced on Twitter with a link to a YouTube video and fandoms like Hannibal have really embraced connecting with their fans on Twitter and Tumblr, never before has it been so easy to send instantaneous feedback to content producers and exploration of this is needed and timely.

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