Fandoms

You can ask me if I am a fan of something, it can be anything at all, I'm likely to say no, for the simple reason that I've never been comfortable with the term "fan" and never really understood what it meant to actually be one.  When I was younger before the internet became so prevalent, if you liked something enough, you could join or start a fan club.  Those were run by people who, to me, they had a fascination and a dedication for the things they were devoted to.  So for example if you take singers, Fan clubs relating to singers would have information about the singer, and anything and everything that they were doing.  Some were professionally run, some were amateur run, the former had a wealth of resources that were made available to them and in hindsight that could best be described as a form of direct marketing.

I was never interested in anything to the extent where I was willing to devote that much time and energy to it, to want to know literally everything about the person or the movie or the game or whatever was the focus of the fan club.  To that end, I came to associate the concept of a fan being someone who was a member of those clubs.  So even though there were things I liked and that I read a lot about, I never really considered myself a fan.

Today the bar for entry has been lowered quite a bit though.  Today for most people to consider you a fan of something you just have to follow it or have an interest in it.  This is where fandoms come into play.  A fandom is a collective, usually disorganized or disoriented, comprised of all the people that consider themselves fans of something.  There's an important distinction to be made here, in that these are people who self identify, rather than being people who others have identified as fans.  These people form a kind of moderator or validator and depending on how weak or how strongly the sense of community is that emerged around that fandom they can react quite negatively if someone labels you a fan of something when they don't see you as being that.  These are people who will insist to be a fan of a certain singer you have to own every album or to be fans of a certain actor then you have to have seen every movie they have been in.  This is where the conflict and the drama arises which is yet another reason why I don't like the term and I actively avoid it.

The only reason I am aware of the way people react is because I watch a lot of YouTube videos, in particular I watch a lot of Let's Players, these are people who play through video games, recording their experience and upload it to YouTube for others to watch.  If you have an interest in that sort of thing you probably know where I am going with this.  From time to time you'll see a YouTube personality take a game and play through it quite innocently but in doing so they demonstrate the fact that it's either their first time playing the game, or they know very little about it.  This is where it begins.  The amount of hate that these people receive is unreal.  When you take the time even just a few minutes to read through some of the comments below the video, the word cesspool seems quite appropriate.

There's a related channel, one that I have mentioned before run by a guy named Matthew Patrick aka MatPat called The Game Theorists, he also runs The Film Theorists which I have mentioned before particularly in reference to The Matrix.  These channels take Games or Films, explore their cannon, and extend it with theories of their own as to alternate explanations or posing questions you might not have considered and then giving possible answers to them.  Not surprisingly these channels step on the toes of fandoms quite a bit, and the response to those videos borders on psychotic.

In life you are meant to question things, you're meant to make mistakes, and you're meant to learn things as you go.  Whenever you are presented with something that you are not allowed to question, that you must blindly accept, that is Dogma, and that is the tool of despots and dictators.  Dogma actively enforces conformity and opposes any dissent.  What people are demonstrating when they react so violently to questions is not their admiration or their devotion to the thing they are fans of, but rather their blind faith and indoctrination.

I'm not a fan nor do I want to be part of a fandom devoted to anything for the simple reason that I find this behaviour incredibly toxic and the only thing it achieves in the end is to make other people hate the thing you profess to be a fan of, I have seen this many times where fandoms become so poisonous that the things they are dedicated to end up suffering as a result.  I've seen people who refuse to watch or even talk about TV shows particularly on social media for fear of being attacked, I've seen people who refuse to go to concerts because they fear for their physical safety if they went - you might consider this hyperbolic but if you take the time to ask people what their opinion of fandoms are in general, you'll see the prevailing opinion from anyone who isn't a part of them will be one that is incredibly negative.

There is a twisted irony in the fact that those who become so obsessed with their fandom do so out of the wanton desire for it to be sustained indefinitely when the reality is that almost all fandoms are centred around products for sale that need to be a commercial success, the more people you exclude, and the more people you turn off from the focus of your fandom, the less of a commercial success it becomes, and if your toxicity becomes so overwhelming that it becomes a commercial failure then it disappears entirely and you get relegated to a life sustained only by that which already exists with no hope of anything new.  I realise for some people that is desirable but for most it is not.  Obscurity eventually leads to obsolescence and replacement - a lot of those people will then move onto the next thing and behave in exactly the same way, never learning that it isn't society as a whole but their own community that poisoned the well.