Fans write about Buffy because they love the series, they've noticed something interesting about it on one aspect or another and they want to share their insight and see what other people think. You often get very well-written, tightly constructed, well-thought-out fan posts, which will refer you back, as necessary, to the other posts they've been reading lately that have affected their thinking, perhaps the other things they've been thinking about (Jung, myth, music, theatrical use of colour, Renaissance drama, whatever) that have assisted them to come to the insight they have.

Academics may come up with the idea of writing about Buffy because they love the series; and if they can manage to keep that in the forefront of their minds while writing then there's a good chance they'll produce something very interesting. As good a chance, at least, as that a fan will.

But it's easy, if you're an academic, to forget that you love what you're writing about, because so many other things get in the way, so many other pressures come to bear, and one's original love for the subject matter can easily get obscured or entirely lost.

There are two main problems here.

A) Product, it's all about Product

First, academics are paid to produce articles for scholarly publications. Nobody actually says "we will give you X dollars to write an article", but when tenure, promotion, status in your department and in the field, and merit pay all depend not so much on the content of the CV as on its length and the number of "pieces" and of total published pages it represents, the pressure to produce is pretty strong.

The problem here is that maybe you have a great idea that you'd like to work for three years on. Or maybe you have a few not so interesting ideas that you can probably knock off three articles on in the next six months. Which will you work on? If love of the field were your only concern, you'd pick a) the fabulously interesting 3-year project.

But you're under pressure to pick b), the half-assed stuff you can knock off and get out quickly, and increase your page count. This does not advance the field much; it doesn't advance scholarship or the thinking of your colleagues when they read it; but it does enable you to get a job, tenure, promotion, merit pay, favourable treatment of your research grant proposals... Which are you going to pick? It takes a strong-minded person to say "I will go with the long-term project I really care about".

Or maybe you have a brilliant idea, you think, and you'd put some work into it, and it turns out not to pan out at all. If you were just a fan of the subject matter, you'd say, oh well, and drop it. Or maybe you'd publish a short note saying "I really thought I could get Freud to work on the Oedipal stuff in Buffy, but the more I read up on it the less it seems to be turning up anything interesting - has anyone else looked at this?" on a fan list somewhere, and generate some dialogue.

But if you're an academic, you've invested a few months of your time reading up on this. And if you don't get an article out of it, that was time WASTED. You HAVE to produce something, because of the pressures to produce.

So you produce an article that begins "Application of Freudian theory to the Oedipal complexes of the Buffyverse seems, initially, a fruitful approach to ... " and then you do a brief discussion of Freud, and a brief discussion of the knotty bits of Buffy that you thought it would apply to, and you lard it with 4000 footnotes to make it clear you're a serious hitter here, a member of the club, not just some random amateur, because proving you're a member of the club is so much of academe.

And by the time you've got through that you've already hit page 4 or so. Then you can regretfully concede that "the approach isn't as immediately fruitful as one might at first have hoped", and then go on for another 2 or 3 pages about the passages for which it didn't work. ("Oddly, the relationship between Rupert Giles and Jenny Calendar, which initially seemed such a promising subject for Oedipal deconstruction, proves on closer analysis ...")

And then you adduce some interesting reason for why it didn't work. ("It may perhaps be suggested that in the post-Edwardian world Oedipal analysis proves more complex than Freud could ever have predicted; in the late twentieth century, the family structure on which Freudian analysis depends for so many of its core assumptions has fractured in myriad ways, many of them vividly depicted in the Buffyverse." And then cue 2 or 3 pages on Fractured Families of Sunnydale.)

You then conclude that although your theoretical methodology did not produce immmediately the results one might have expected, an analysis of why it didn't work (which you haven't actually done much of, you've just speculated a bit) has still produced fruitful results. Which it hasn't really, but you've obscured that also, by means of academic jargon and another 4000 footnotes.

And then you send the thing off, and cross your fingers. Because the option of saying "it turns out I have nothing to say on this subject so I'm going to shut up about it" is not an possibility, in the academic world.

B) Style

I mentioned that these articles have to appear in scholarly, peer-reviewed publications. That is, they can't appear in popular magazines, fan websites, your blog, or an email list, if they're going to count for anything on your C.V. And this raises the issue of "style".

I mentioned the necessity for 4000 footnotes. You can't have your own ideas; you have to demonstrate that some important person had them before you did, or said something on which you're basing your thoughts. Or rather, you can have your own ideas but they can't have just come to you in a dream in the middle of the night (as in fact good ideas so often do); you have to link them to previous scholarship.

And there are good reasons for this - it keeps us from reinventing the wheel; it acknowledges that we're stepping into the middle of a conversation and explains what has gone before, for the benefit of those who don't know, and of those who have been following the debate for awhile now and want to know where you stand in relation to other opinions.

But there are lousy reasons for it, too. One is, proving you're a member of the club by showing how many of the other member's names you can rhyme off in a sentence. (On which please see, and I"m sorry but I can't resist and it's a great article, Steven Nimis' hilarious and disturbing article, "Fussnoten: Das Fundament Der Wissenschaft", Arethusa (sometime in the 1990's or late 1980's), on the use of -particularly German - footnotes in the field of Classics to demonstrate that you're a member of the Inner Circle.) This leads to irrelevant German footnotes, footnotes citing 27 people in a single note, footnotes to perfectly obvious statements (eg. "the sky is blue (cf. Wartcroller, "Colour: 20th-century Algorithms in perception theory", Nature and Art 27 (1994):93). Which proves you have read Wartcroller or at least know that you should have done.)

And another reason is academic style. Which is also the reason for a lot of jargon. Jargon, like footnotes, may improve precision and clarity but very often simply proves that you're a member of the club, you've got the dialect and the pin and the secret handshake and, heaven knows, the secret ritual scarifications, and can be taken seriously by the other members. But it's also just a matter of style - like wearing heels with a skirt, we must footnote and use jargon in order to 'look right'.

All of which makes a lot of academic articles impenetrably dull. And the pressure to produce makes a great many of them pointless, too.

So reading Fighting the Forces, which actually has some good articles, has been enlightening for me; because however good the articles are, the genre is academic and the reasons for their production differ markedly from the things people write only because they love what they're writing about.