"Fan Service"
hypergenesb
Atlanta
in Other TV
I've been noticing over the last year a significant increase in the use of the term "fan service" in not only Bald Move casts, but most TV podcasts. Most recently, @Jim and @A_Ron_Hubbard have been using it in several of the Stranger Things casts. In the 2.01 cast, they said that the arcade scene, with Dragon's Lair and Dig Dug video games, was fan service. I don't understand how this is fan service. My question is this: What's the difference between world building, homage, and fan service? What kinds of things qualify as fan service?
Comments
To me all of those things are different types of fan service, things that didn't necessarily need to be done or done they way they were but were intentionally done so as a sort of nod to the audience.
I think world building can certainly involve fan service but is really the adding of layers of details to the world to make it seem more lived in/real/relatable. I'm not sure I'd call the iconic Atari and Coca-cola ads in Blade Runner fan service, but it's certainly world-building.
Marshall further elaborated:
The two things that actually pissed me off the most about stranger things were some visuals/atmosphere that were straight up stolen. The look of the upside down is ripped directly from "Under The Skin" and the other dimension that the demi gorgons come from is basically Silent Hill. The ash, the darkness, the decomposing interiors that change.
I understand art is always going to influenced by what came before it, but at least give it your own spin. Don't just copy and paste peoples hard work - that now, if you are not familiar with Under the Skin or Silent Hill, people will credit toward Stranger Things. And that's not cool.
However, increasingly it's being used to describe anything that a show runner or creator does to make fans happy at the expense of plot. But like other specific terms; literally, hack, trope, or "high concept", "pot boiler", it's being borrowed to mean tangential things that get further and further from it's original meaning one step and shift at a time. I'm as guilty as any and more so than most.
aberry89 said:
I could have been one of the kids on this show. Me and my friends played D&D, idolized Venkman and went to arcades to play these exact video games (I was the MadMax of my crew when it came to Dig Dug). When Dragon's Lair came to my local arcade, it was all we talked about for quite a while. It very different from other games of that era: 1) it had high production values because it didn't use sprites/pixels, it used hi-resolution animation played off of a LaserDisc; 2) it was a choose-your-adventure gameplay narrative, and 3) it cost 50 cents per play, a relatively new concept for arcade games. As for Dig Dug, it was a popular game in that time, but certainly wasn't a Donkey Kong, Galaga or Centipede, meaning it wasn't everyone's favorite. All of this to say: These games were perfectly chosen, as was having a scene at an arcade. This is exactly what these kids would have done. I know, because I was one of them, shitty haircut and all.
I get that the definition shifting to a broadening meaning would be a bit annoying, but who cares? The term itself, "fan service", is itself a neutral name that can be logically applied positively or negatively. If you can't tell which in any given example then you're either not paying enough attention or the person using it isn't expressing a cogent point. Words and phrases gain and shift meaning all the time.
Like A. Ron said, fan service used to deserve this negative perception because it was almost always scantily women in movies, tv, manga, anime, etc.
Nowadays, I think it should be a neutral term. Having the Millennium Falcon appear in Ep. VII was fan service, and I loved that shit.