Attention Buffy Fans

[yendi]

There's a survey at
http://home.earthlink.net/~buffysurvey/Buffy/Survey.html that's being conducted for an academic study of the show and its fans. Fill it out if you have the time (it's not exactly short).

Comments

[rollick.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting survey, and I'd love to see what she eventually does with it. I'm most interested in seeing a wide variety of honest answers to this one:

One of the strange effects of being a fan is that sometimes we feel a sense of intimacy with characters or actors because we become so familiar with them. Have you had this experience? That is, do you ever feel as though you know personally particular characters or actors? If so, does the one-sidedness of this situation ever bother you? That is, does it ever bother you that actors do not (because they're famous) or characters cannot (because they're fictional) know you in return?

Have you filled it out yet? I'm interested in doing so when I have time, but my answers are going to be pretty boring, considering I've never been involved in any kind of organized or group fandom, never created anything based on the show, and I only started watching it regularly some time last year.

[yendi]

I filled out the survey, although many of my answers were boring as well. The closest I've ever come to being involved in "official" tv fandoms was back in the mid-'90s, when I was on very active listservs for Lois and Clark and Highlander. Some of the questions, though, were thought-provoking, even if I didn't have a whole lot to say about them. I've always found the ability of some folks to connect so deeply to a show that they "know" the characters to be both disturbing and impressive.