Fandom

• 1. Introduction

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  When Sherlock Holmes was killed off in 1893, his readers held public demonstrations of mourning. That grief, for a detective who never lived, is one of the earliest signs of fandom at work. A fandom is a subculture of fans bound by camaraderie over a shared interest. What sets these people apart is intensity. They chase even minor details about the object of their devotion. They pour time and energy into it, usually inside a social network with its own practices, which separates them from anyone with only a casual interest. The word itself is older than most assume. Merriam-Webster traces it back as far as 1903, when it described people with an enthusiastic appreciation for sports. So how does a feeling for a fictional detective, or a sports team, or a cartoon pony, harden into a community with its own language, conventions, and rules? And what happens when those communities grow powerful enough to talk back to the industries that feed them? The answers run through mourning rituals, smuggled tapes, costumes, charity drives, and a self-declared religion built on the Jedi.

• 2. Roots Of Devotion

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  Feminist scholar Adrianne Wadewitz pointed to the Janeites, devotees of the 19th century author Jane Austen, as the earliest example of fandom subculture, beginning around 1870. Their attachment to Austen predates almost everything we now recognize in the form. The Sherlock Holmes faithful followed soon after, and they did more than mourn. They created some of the first fan fiction, written as early as about 1897 to 1902, extending the detective's life past the page. Railway enthusiasts offer a different kind of origin, one outside media entirely. Their fandom took root in the late 19th century and grew steadily, becoming increasingly organized through the first decades of the early 20th century. A wide range of modern Western fan subcultures trace back to science fiction fandom, the community of fans of science fiction and fantasy. That fandom dates to the 1930s and built organized clubs and associations in cities around the world. Fans have held the annual World Science Fiction Convention since 1939 and invented their own jargon, sometimes called fanspeak. The Society for Creative Anachronism, a medievalist re-creation group, grew directly out of science fiction fandom. Authors including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Poul Anderson, Randall Garrett, David D. Friedman, and Robert Asprin have been members.

• 3. Splitting And Spreading

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  Media fandom broke away from science fiction fandom in the early 1970s, turning its attention to relationships between characters inside franchises like Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Where typical science fiction fandom favored critical discussion, these fans made things. They produced fan art and fan fiction about the people on screen. The MediaWest convention supplied a video room and helped give rise to fan vids, analytic music videos built from a source, in the late 1970s. By the mid-1970s, you could meet fans at science fiction conventions who never read science fiction at all and only watched it on film or television. Anime and manga fandom began in the 1970s in Japan. In America it grew as another offshoot of science fiction fandom, as fans carried imported copies of Japanese manga into conventions. Before anime was licensed in the United States, fans who wanted it would leak copies of anime movies and subtitle them to trade with friends, which marked the start of fansubs. The furry fandom started at a science fiction convention in 1980. A drawing of a character from Steve Gallacci's Albedo Anthropomorphics sparked a discussion of anthropomorphic characters in science fiction novels, which then formed a discussion group meeting at science fiction and comics conventions. Many furries create fursonas, personalized animal characters representing themselves. According to a 2020 survey in The New Science of Narcissism, 95% of furries have a fursona.

• 4. New Tribes Online

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  The brony fandom formed around the animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, surfacing in late 2010 and early 2011 on the imageboard 4chan before spreading to other online communities. Its name is a portmanteau of bro and pony. Bronies built a distinctive vernacular, run numerous fan conventions, and sustain a culture of charitable activity. They create personalized pony characters called ponysonas, an echo of the furry fursona, alongside fan fiction, fan art, and original music inspired by the show. The fandom notably includes military personnel who have worked pony imagery into their units. It has drawn media attention and academic study for challenging traditional gender norms around entertainment. Music fandom rose alongside popular music culture in the 20th century, organized around devotion to specific artists, bands, or genres. Fans attend concerts, make fan art, join online communities, and follow media about their chosen artist. These communities help promote and support careers and shape cultural trends in the music industry. Beatlemania, Swifties, Deadheads, and Barbz are among the best-known examples. The Grateful Dead subculture, which emerged from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, built a global fandom around hippie culture that left lasting marks on both society and technology.

• 5. What Fans Make

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  Fanzines and newsletters once carried the daily life of fandom, traded by hand among members who gathered at conventions. Amateur press associations served as another channel for publication and networking. These print-based subcultures later moved much of their communication onto the Internet, which also became an archive for detailed information about each fanbase. Fans gather on forums and discussion boards to share both love and criticism for a specific work, which can build tight community and, at times, infighting. Most boards carry some hierarchy, valuing certain contributors above others, yet newcomers are usually welcomed in. Fan fiction sits at the center of this making. These stories use the universe and characters of a chosen fandom, sometimes following the canon and sometimes ignoring the plot entirely. Fan fiction can take the form of video as well as writing. At events, fans take up cosplay, creating and wearing costumes in the likeness of characters from a source work, often paired with role-playing or reenacting scenes. Others produce fan vids and fan art, activities sometimes called fan labor or fanac, short for fan activity. The Internet expanded all of it. Fans built shrines to favorite characters, screen wallpapers, and avatars. They make edits, images placing fandom characters into new scenarios, shared on Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, or Pinterest. They assemble gifs and gif sets that capture minute expressions or stage non-canon moments, including reaction gifs that show how a fan feels about a character or event.

• 6. Belief And Activism

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  The Temple of the Jedi Order, also called Jediism, describes itself as a real living, breathing religion and views itself as separate from the Jedi of the Star Wars franchise. Sociologists see the blending of religion and fandom in Jediism as legitimate in some sense, classifying both as participatory phenomena. That participatory instinct extends into the political. In fan activism, fans use market logic to apply political pressure, merging consumption with civic goals. Some fan organizations turn that energy toward philanthropy. The Harry Potter Alliance is a civic organization with a strong online component that runs campaigns on human rights issues, often partnering with advocacy and nonprofit groups, and its membership skews college age and above. Nerdfighters, a fandom formed around the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, are mostly high school students united by a goal of decreasing world suck. K-pop fans have taken part in online activism campaigns tied to Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Black Lives Matter movement. Documentaries have tried to capture this world from the outside. Notable feature-length films about fandom include Trekkies and A Brony Tale, while the 2016 movie Slash follows a young boy who writes slash fan fiction.

• 7. Talking Back

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  Fans saved Star Trek from cancellation in 1968, the first in a long line of rescue campaigns. Cagney & Lacey followed in 1983, Xena: Warrior Princess in 1995, Roswell in 2000 and 2001, Farscape and Firefly in 2002, and Jericho in 2007. Firefly's fans did not win another season but instead earned the movie Serenity. Veronica Mars fans pushed a film into existence through a Kickstarter campaign. Chuck fans fought cancellation with a Twitter hashtag and by buying products from the show's sponsors. Arrested Development fans waged a Save Steve Holt campaign, with a Twitter and Facebook account, a hashtag, and a website, to keep that character in the fourth season. The music industry has felt the same pressure. In 2023, Lana Del Rey appeared on Taylor Swift's song Snow on the Beach, a track from the album Midnights. Both Swifties and Del Rey fans were disappointed that her contribution felt too short and too low in the mix. Swift answered with an updated version titled Snow on the Beach (Feat. More Lana Del Rey), singing the entire second verse. Such outcries point to entertainment consumers asserting power as a bloc, a trend visible too in the Fans4Writers support for the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike. Creators have crossed the line in the other direction. Ed Brubaker was a fan of the Captain America comics as a child and was deeply upset by the death of Bucky Barnes. His first work as a writer at Marvel Comics was the fifth volume of Captain America, which brought Barnes back as the Winter Soldier, a brainwashed assassin.

• 8. From Tape To Torrent

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  Early engineers traded Grateful Dead set lists and discussed the setup of the band's concert speaker system, the Wall of Sound, over ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. That exchange seeded a whole technical lineage of fandom. It moved into tape trading over FTP, and the Internet Archive began adding Grateful Dead shows in 1995. Online tape trading communities such as etree evolved into peer-to-peer networks trading shows through torrents. After the World Wide Web arrived, many communities adopted the practices of Deadhead fandom online. The Internet did more than carry tapes. It let fans engage in discourse on a global scale, building an even stronger sense of community. Mark Duffet makes this point in Popular Music Fandom: Identities, Roles and Practices, writing that online social media platforms have operated as a forthright challenge to the idea that electronic mediation is an alienating and impersonal process. The same connective power has a darker edge. Fandoms, for example at Comic Con, can sometimes lead to toxic behavior, including harassing other fans or media creators. One fan fiction shows just how far the line can move. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James began as a Twilight fan fiction on FanFiction.Net before being rewritten, self-published, and eventually released by Random House in 2012, where it sold over 100 million copies, though many fans felt that using fan fiction to make money broke the spirit of the community.