007’s defeat to Tara Chace, what it means

Yesterday, James Bond went down to defeat in a vote of fans at the Mister 8 Web site. It got us to thinking about the nature of fandom and how one fandom can vary to another.

For some fandoms, there’s a sort of intimacy. Tara Chance/Queen and Country writer Greg Rucka used Twitter.com to urge fans to vote for his character and it apparently contributed to Tara outpacing 007 258 votes to 56. It was a case of a creator reached out directly to his audience. There are other examples of this. The makers of the two Iron Man movies used comic book conventions to help sell the movie to fans, helping to create positive word of mouth before either film opened. This general model goes back to Gene Roddenberry talking to college audiences in the 1970s to keep Star Trek interest strong, eventually leading to production of new movies and television series.

Meanwhile, a post on this weblog got linked in some of the Twitter postings, which generated traffic for us. One tweet in particular said in part:

Bond fans predictably, “who cares?”

That’s a reference to one of the responses to our post from yesterday.

Bond fandom is more like a series of corporations, where some fans argue who was the first “professional fan” Eon Productions never went the fan convention route until 1994, part of an effort to revive fan interest after a hiatus in making 007 films that began in 1989. There’s never been a lot of direct outreach to fans. That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, but Bond lacks the direct connection between creators and fans found elsewhere.

The creator of the Mister 8 site, in a response to one of our posts said his “May Madness” competition” among fictional spies is, “all a lark, in good fun.”

He’s right. It makes some amusing reading. But it also shows different fandoms operate, and that can be interesting to observe, as well.

UPDATE: For those unfamiliar with Tara Chace and Queen & Country, JUST CLICK HERE.

To view an article from the HMSS archives about The Sandbaggers, the inspiration for Queen & Country, CLICK HERE.