[Who is Fandom? Mad Brides and the Willfully Blind: The Fans]
If I asked you to describe a ‘typical fan’ I bet I know the first image that springs to mind. Lonely, isolated, social awkward nerd. Or maybe the ‘newer breed’ – older, disenfranchised women obsessed with the Twilight series.
The point is, the term ‘fan’ is a label that conjures up many negative connotations. Someone who is out of touch with reality, someone distracted by trivial minutiae that has no baring on Real Life. Someone who needs to get a Real Life.
But the truth is, the fan label (and fandom) is a lot more complicated that that. Like any stereotype, it highlights a small portion of what makes the object and enhances and exaggerates it, leaving the rest of the mixture very much in the dark. We see what we want to see, what is comfortable for us to acknowledge. Fandom has found itself thrust into the mainstream with the explosion of social networking – suddenly, fandom is not the elitist doyen of online fan forums, it is everywhere. Fans are everywhere, and only sometimes do they conform to this previously held stereotypical worldview people have had of the ‘fanatical’ fan.
Fans can have all those negative attributes. There are those who are terribly obsessed. There are those dubbed the Willfully Blind by TvTropes.org, who refuse to recognise faults in the object of their fandom and refuse to acknowledge that others may not like it the way they do. There are the elitists who believe that since they have been with a fandom since the beginning they are True Fans and as such display an overwhelming sense of entitlement. There are those who escape reality to immerse themselves in fictionally realised worlds and characters, like the Mad Brides/Grooms who TvTropes.org describe as those who become consumed by a particular character to a point where they over-idealise them to extremes.
We find ourselves in this place where Fandom walks a tightrope between being socially accepted and ridiculed to varying degrees. On the one hand, reams of tropes are written to explain every dirty fandom secret, while on the other mainstream fans are encouraged to become Fans and Superfans on apps like GetGlue to earn stickers and be immortalised for the same kind of dedication that was once frowned on.
So if you were so inclined, how would you know if you could call yourself a fan? It’s not as if it’s a title that you’re born with, or a title conferred on you by royalty (although in some fandoms it can feel like the later). Whether or not you’re a fan is highly dependent on whether you see yourself as one, and that’s really all there is to it. Sure, there may be people in older, more established fandoms (ie Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek) who would have you believe that it takes a lot more than that, but the fact is that because there are so many levels of fandom and fan involvement, the fact is that you can simply identify yourself as a fan in the simplest form. If you like to watch a particular tv show every week, you’re a fan. You may not be card-carrying diehard who knows the ins and outs of the show and its history, but in the purest form you are a fan.
Who decides what constitutes a True Fan is more complicated. Fandom is like any society or even religion – it is self governed and evolving. It is usually the higher-level members of a particular fandoms social hierarchy that establish the rules for their particular fandoms. Academics have long studied the distinctions between a simple ‘audience’ and a ‘fan’.
These different distinctions of audience and fan affect provide suitable groundwork to initiate discussion into my understanding of the fan and fandom as descriptors that are multi-layered and complex, with psychological and sociological impacts. Several theorists have attempted to create a distinct labelling a categorisation system of audience engagement and affect; I consider all of these viewers as ‘fans’, just on a sliding scale of engagement. “Television and the Cult Audience: A Primer” Hillary Robson
So can anyone be a fan or in fandom? Yes. In the end it’s primarily just about sharing a common interest in a community with other like-minded people. How active a member are person will ultimately become (that is, how much they engage in fandom, what ‘type’ of fan they end up becoming) will ultimately depend on the person, and I do believe that certain kinds of people (for want of a better phrase) are more likely to become heavily involved and buy into the whole Fandom Polotik.
