"You'll get there" VS "You're not you..."

When I  have a contrarian reaction to something, it inspires me to think of what I would like to see in its place. That happened today after  someone in my LinkedIn feed shared the Snickers commercial that featured Betty White getting pounded in football practice back in 2010.

Another senior actor who appears briefly at the end is Abe Vigoda, who is famous for his role as Fish on Barney Miller.* (What's really remarkable is that he looks very much the way he did in the 1970s, and he happens to be playing to type, as Fish was constantly complaining of his aches and pains that he attributed to again.). No one focused on Vigoda, though who is not named in the commercial the way White is. 

In fact, this commercial opened the door to other commercials in the snack category, so the actress was quite busy with lucrative work when she was already in her late 80s. That someone can continue to work in their profession even when past the standard age of retirement is a very good thing. 

What is not a very good thing is the unconscious bias against older people that colors this commercial. They are not even themselves but stand-ins for the substandard "you" in the tagline "You're not you when  you're hungry."

I get that it was played for humor and that it certainly resonated with the target market for the candy bar that experienced a surge in sales after this campaign. But success is not necessarily the reward for virtue or an absence of bias, as we see from the example of the Yorkie bar. 

Back around the same period as theat Snickers campaign, the British Yorkie bar that put "It's not for girls" on its label with a female figure crossed out taking the play of the O in its name. Taking this so far that samples of the chocolate bar were only distributed to men and not given to women in 2002 did land the brand in trouble, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't finding the sexist messaging worked to increase sales to men. It must have worked if the company kept it going until 2011 despite the protests and even outright bans it incurred.

So we see that sexism is used as a marketing gimmick and can increase sales, and I'd say the same applies to ageism. Things are getting slightly better as marketers realize that older people -- particularly women -- are a viable market unto themselves. 

What I'd like to see is a commercial in which older people are not just featured as the "you" that you don't wish to be but as the "you" that you aspire to be. It can be used to promote a rage of products and services related to building one's future through education, investment, health, etc with the tagline "You'll get there." 

*Speaking of Barney Miller, Hal Linden, who played the title role is still alive and kicking and acting at 93 (AMV)! 

Charlotte Brontë's Juvenilia and Fanfiction

What was the original fanfiction? If you look this up, as I did, you'd find that most date it to the 1960s when Star Trek fans  penned their own tales about the characters onboard the Enterprise.  This was, of course, pre-internet, so these stories were shared via actual publication. 

A few article on fanfiction claim that the genre (yes, many would count it as that) predates the world of television. They would claim that references and reimaginings of pre-existing stories can fall under that umbrella term and so count works of  literature like Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost as fanfiction for the Bible. Some even contend that Shakespeare's plays are fanfiction because they rework stories that were invented earlier. 

I don't quite buy that broad definition of the term. I'd possibly grant that Sherlock Holmes stories by authors other than Arthur Conan Doyle could rank as fanfiction in depicting a recognized character that someone else had invented in new stories, though I wouldn't say that any work of literature that is infulenced by common stories and myths can be considered fanfiction. 

What's the key differentiator here? I think it may really need to start on the basis of  deep interest in a character they did not first create. But would that character have to originated in fiction for fanfiction? I think not. 

On that basis, I'd content that Brontë's juvenilia constitutes fanfiction -- a term I wasn't familiar with back in the day when I wrote my dissertation. Her depictions of the Duke of Wellington that evolved into the Duke of Zamorna and then the king of Angria really was a Victorian forerunner of modern fanfiction. 

Much in the way fanfiction writers take their inspiration from television characters, Brontë looked to the celebrity figure of her day and cast him in new adventures and then her own world. Whereas Louisa May Alcott was able to profit from her overwrought tales that did sell, Brontë's were not meant for publication.