Jenkins allows us to see that the fan's position is that no object of fandom is complete or perfect or whole in itself. Fans are eager to praise what is right about an object, point out what is wrong, and propose solutions and new directions for the development of that object because they think that fandom is what completes and perfects the object. The object is about the fan. It is not the fan who is devoted to the object so much as the object that serves the needs of the fan—and, initially, does not do a very good job of that; the fan must invest work into the object to customize the object to better suit the fan's wishes.
Jenkins also enables us to grasp that, from the fan’s perspective, there is a clear separation between his or her labor on a commodity and the labor of the official producers of that commodity. If fans must smooth out the rough edges of an object, if they must explore and actualize the unrealized possibilities of an object, then it is the official producers who are to blame for giving the object its undesirable attributes and suppressing its more interesting potentials. The fact that fans feel compelled to labor on things means that the labor that went into bringing that thing to the marketplace was shoddy or insufficient or, at best, left much to be desired. This distance between the fan laborer and the official producer is one reason that fans have not often regarded themselves as laborers. The fans’ efforts to customize mass commodities are for themselves and their fellow fans only, not for the marketplace and not for average consumers (i.e., nonfans). One might hypothesize that fans think of their activities as driven by an interest in unleashing the best and highest promise of their favored objects rather than being motivated by financial gain, as official producers are; many fans therefore think of their motives as purer than those of official producers and see themselves as above questions of market value, advertising, and sales. The frustration and antagonism that fans frequently feel toward official producers have largely prevented fans from regarding themselves as part of the same capitalist system within which official producers operate.
Hills: Fans and Exchange-Value
However, as Hills argues in Fan Cultures, fans are, in fact, essential components of the capitalist system within which official producers operate. Hills addresses the prevalent concept of the “resistive” fan, stating that “an expressed hostility within cult fandoms towards commercialisation and commodification... [has] led to the theorization of cult TV fandom (and other related media fandoms) as somehow anti-consumerist."10 But there is an inherent contradiction in fandom, Hills writes
Fandom as Free Labor
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