Buzznet is to Soap Opera as...

I've been chatting with my friend Shana this morn, and it brought up a point that I wanted to share quite some time ago.

Part of my overarching plan for this blog was to talk about these issues in my head in the light of previous media scholarship. There's a great handful of articles on soap opera fandoms in England and Australia (I'll look up the citations when I get home) that set out a couple of ways that soap operas attract fans and build them into a community. These things are often what female fans told me attracted them to fandom at large.

1. Soaps provide a break from the daily chores, a set time for pleasure. Bands do the same thing, where you substitute "job" for chores. I spend my lunch hour discussing band news and gossip, and it's a welcome hour.

2. Soaps provide a place where the talk of women is valued. Both in the text, because most soaps are driven by plots and talking, instead of action or comedy, and outside of the text, where women have a reason to gather and talk to each other, to use that opening to discuss their lives or their viewpoints with each other.

3. Soaps provide parasocial interaction; viewers form an attachment to the fictional characters within. Not to say that the boys in bands are fictional, but strangers are developing attachments to them. Watching girls fight with words over who gets to pick Brendon Urie as their favorite band boy is just like watching my female relatives debate who was the best of Erica Kane's husbands. (Answer, clearly, Dimitri.)