FANDOM CULTURE

fan(atic)

Introduction

AN UNBIASED LOOK AT THE FANDOM CULTURE, THE STIGMA BEHIND IT, AND

IT ’S VERY LONG HISTORY

The History

The Modern

Angles and Deep Viewing

-Unbiased narrative, with dialogue pertaining to both the negatives and positives of the culture

-High angled wide shots of comic cons and auditoriums

--MCU shots of interviewee

--Wide shots of bedroom walls and CU’s of memorabilia

--Smash cuts of various pictures and videos of fans going crazy

--Light soundtrack music with intercuts of songs from huge celebrity singers/bands

--Various look at new technology/social media and the opportunities of connection they provide

It’s Complicated

A discussion with two interviewee’s with thoughts and opinions on the culture of fandom that are incredibly unbiased in regards of their experiences.

What I feel towards fandom is both a great sense of kinship, and a significant caution. No culture or community is a monolith, and fandom is no different.

So when I think of fandoms and what they mean to me, or could mean to anyone, I think about a box full of untrained puppies: adorable, eager for affection, but accident-prone, destructive, and liable to pee on everything you love.

When you’ve always doubted your ability to make friends, finding people who like the same things you like for the same reasons you like them, people who like YOU, it can be very hard, at first, to draw healthy boundaries. When I think of fandoms and what they mean to me, or could mean to anyone, I think about a box full of untrained puppies: adorable, eager for affection, but accident-prone, destructive, and liable to pee on everything you love.

Fandom has the greatest capacity for good, but also the greatest capacity for not-so-good. At their best, fandoms can enact social change— the Harry Potter fandom, via its main fan-run charity, the Harry Potter Alliance, raised over $100,000 in relief aid after the earthquakes in Haiti in 2010. They can be safe spaces for kids who have never fit in at their schools, or in IRL social situations

If something is popular amongst teenage girls, it’s basically a shoe-in to get mocked by pop culture at large. When you factor that into fandom, and multiply it by those basement nerds who’ve got years of pent up frustration and aggression, it turns into the Fake Geek Girl meme. The idea that teen girls couldn’t possibly LIKE genre stuff, so they must be into it for ulterior reasons—to get boys, to “look cool.” Fandom becomes a merit badge you have to earn by proving how much you know/how much you care.

But what fandom also means is a mature space to hash out criticisms and meta. If fandom at its worst is an echo chamber, then fandom at its best is a palimpsest: people writing stories on top of stories, never losing the original architecture but always willing to paint over the old with the new.

I will say that the loudest people will get the most attention, and the loudest people can be the worst. When a vocal minority is abusive and terrible to a celebrity, or cast and crew on twitter, it creates a terrible reputation.

In short, fandom is everything.

-Leah

First of all, find the line between passion and obsession, because (again) technology has made the two inextricably linked -- just look at the sort of things "Beliebers" are cited as saying and doing, for example, and you'll find that the definition of what constitutes a "fan" has drifted away from its conventional meaning (fan = an enthusiastic devotee, follower, or admirer of a sport, pastime,celebrity, etc) back into the territory of the word it derived from: "fanatic" -- a person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal. And, frankly, I think behavior like that should be discouraged. It's not healthy, for individuals or for society as a whole.

Being in a fandom that actively talked about adult topics (Don't Ask Don't Tell, gay marriage, world politics in general) broadened my perspective. And being a young, confused teenager in the midst of a diverse cadre of confident and supportive adults -- it was a godsend. I’ve been fortunate to gravitate toward like-minded individuals who are quite socially conscious as to how their words and fan creations will be received by audiences in general, and teenagers specifically, and who take the time to think carefully about the messages they’re sending via their work

Fandom is a teen-heavy place. Couple that demographic with access to instantaneous communication and you have a recipe for negativity on a huge scale, because: a) the teenage brain is not fully-cooked as far as logic and rational processing are concerned; b) you're dealing with heavy emotional content, as many of us come to fandom because we love and/or strongly identify with certain characters or their relationships; c) it's been scientifically demonstrated that people interpret typed interaction more negatively than its equivalent in spoken words; d) the sort of population that gravitates toward digital interaction already has weaker social skills, on average, than the general population; e) digital culture has given rise to a number of anxiety-related issues in teenagers specifically to do with internet involvement/popularity, and so you get whole subsets of fandom purely dedicated to serving individual egoes.

With novels and films, I'm often interested in the hypothetical ways to fill the spaces between and around what canon has given me, so I'll wade into fandom looking for fiction that explores those things. Or I'll find the ideas presented in a film intellectually striking and churn out some meta to discuss with other people. When I was in high school and university, a lot of my involvement was about carving out an identity for myself. (Which, let's be real, is a large part of why teenagers do anything near and dear to their hearts.) As an adult I've come into fandoms for reasons more directly related to the artistic media themselves: with novels and films, I'm often interested in the hypothetical ways to fill the spaces between and around what canon has given me, so I'll wade into fandom looking for fiction that explores those things.

Girls are dismissed for their enthusiasm and creativity because of a cultural perception that girls are emotional and obsessive/clingy. There’s a conventional wisdom that teen girls might love a thing, but if they do then said thing must be vapid and beneath the interest of ~anyone with taste. By contrast, when boys collectively fall in love with something that lands on the media’s radar, it’s made out to be the natural thing to do, because the content must be worth loving.

The producers of a medium, on the other hand—be they writers, directors, actors, or members of a marketing/social media team— are aware of fandom. Those in the entertainment industry whom I know personally find fandom disconcerting, overwhelming, and/or amusing, depending on the type and quantity of interaction; other actors have gone on public record saying that they find fandom intrusive and distraction, while some have said they appreciate fandom’s enthusiasm.

-Katherine