When I say “fan”, what springs to mind? A football supporter, bellowing a team’s anthem? A Harry Potter lover, decked out in full house colours, waiting for the new book at midnight? A One-Directioner – or, half a century ago, someone caught in the throes of Beatlemania – fainting when the boys first grace the stage? People dressed as superheroes down to the tiniest detail, swarming a convention centre? A culture – maybe online, maybe in person – that frightens you, that seems dangerously fixated or depressingly antisocial, living in basements, playing with action figures, rolling twenty-sided dice? Or a culture – maybe online, maybe in person – that defines you: a place where you’ve found community, a way to live deeply within the space of a person or a thing that you admire, the purest distillation of a world ordered by taste?
Perhaps it’s because in the past year I’ve written a number of pieces about fan culture, both for this site and The Millions, where I’m a staff writer. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been feeling more and more emboldened to discuss a big part of my life that I’ve kept under wraps for the past two decades. But all over recently, at parties, standing outside pubs after work, on various social media platforms, people are asking me about fans – or, more specifically, about fandom. “Is this a new thing?” many wonder. These are not self-identified fans or members of (a) fandom (and I’d argue that one of the only real requirements for either of these things is self-identification). But they’ve seen a whole lot of talk about it – about how Fifty Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfic, or how every media outlet in the world had a reporter at San Diego Comic-Con this past weekend, or how fan activity can revive a television show from the dead, or how fannish types dominate certain corners of the web. “It’s not new,” I always tell these curious people. “It’s just that these days, for a whole host of reasons, it’s a hell of a lot easier for everyone to see.”
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