I have no idea. Sometimes I feel like I am part of the problem. Other times I feel like everyone is against me.
Like, one of my fundamental beliefs is "I am one of them", which is to say, I am no different than other human, there is nothing special about me except in the ways everyone is special. And yet, I keep feeling like: the larger a fandom is, the more hostile it is, that the way people approach Lore is bad, and that a lot of meme are ugly and disgusting. But like, why do I feel left out? I am one of them!
The more I hang out in fandom, the more I feel like my opinion are wrong, my conclusion incorrect, what I thought was objective is subjective and that the gap of communication between each other is truly vast. Those are not inherently bad things, sometimes I do get my head up my ass, but other times I feel stressed just hanging out with in those Discords.
I don't know. I don't leave fandoms because like, who is going to listen to my rants about Fallen London and how the Great Chain of Being in that universe related to the same concept in ours, and what the difference between the two reveal the thematic underpinning of the game? And some people are cool. If anybody, it's going to be in fandom. But man, I really don't like it there.

when you interact with a work with hobby levels of time, you get invested.

when people with low perspective do that they tend to think there needs to be a way the metawork goes, if unconsciously

when enough people do it, they start driving out people with more perspective than them.

it's not fandom, ime. it's anything that's onboarding and etiquette mechanisms can't keep up with the second order Endless September the iPhone ushered in with everyone having access without much priming, for better and worse.

because the only strategy for picking up ettequette that works is lurking, but if you lurk to learn, the most active posters are always the newest. so they're often learning from the people without any community history, thinking it's deep lore.

it used to be different. I'm not sure it could have stayed even if people knew. a big part of it is people not seeing mods and mentors as having reasons for saying things, or their labor as valuable (and digital labor alienation is rife across all perspective brackets, don't get me wrong). and ofc it depends on the fandom.

but there were a lot less people raised in white suburbs who don't realize their normal was shaped by evangelicals.

honestly, i think it's like any other hobby, in that you're going to have people who are mostly just having a good time writing their little fics and drawing their little arts and collecting things, and then also some people are just going to be weird toxic freaks about it, and unfortunately their bad behavior is what draws attention to the whole thing for a lot of people. i think it must be similar to how i feel about most sports. i can't fathom having enough interest in them to, say, start a riot, and i assume that doesn't really represent the majority of sports fans but as an outsider it's hard to parse LOL

This is why the classification of furry as a 'fandom' is always a bit weird to me. I think there is certainly a segment of furry activity that is about collecting books by your favorite furry author or art prints by your favorite artist or whatever, but a whole lot more of it is people painstakingly crafting their own persona in a very queer and almost spiritual way, for some. Like, a lot of furry is people realizing who they in fact are, and finding ways to express that true self to others. I think for a lot of people their fursona is on the same level or importance as their gender in terms of how much it represents who they are

I don't really have any awareness of most other fandoms, like ones oriented around specific brands or media, in terms of how they engage with that like.. identity/spiritual aspect that I think furry genuinely has. Like are people out here figuring out who they are deep down because they saw the latest marvel movie? Maybe some, I just don't get it if so.

I suspect a large part of this is the one-two punch of the intertwining of art with capitalism and the totalising, alienating force of capitalism in our lives.

For most people, meaningfully interacting with the people who make the bulk of their art is all but impossible, and for popular (in the sense of having a lot of fans) artists, meaningfully interacting with the bulk of people who appreciate their art is also impossible.

In order to facilitate the having of lots of fans, the relationship between artist and fan has to be reduced to a money relation, to payment for content.

The problem with this, of course, is that content is the artistic equivalent of empty calories. It'll fill time, sure, it'll engage the senses, but it's limited by its role as product and commodity — content is for everyone, so it must be for nobody.

Enter The Fandom.

With the artist unavailable for participation, the next best thing is The Fandom. Whether a subreddit or a fan club, The Fandom becomes a surrogate for the artist, a community of real people that can actually be interacted with to engage with art beyond a surface level, actual people with (alleged) knowledge of The Themes and The Meanings of the art.

This, naturally, has the problems we're familiar with. When art is reduced to content, part of the process is having the edges sanded off. Content in large part becomes inkblot tests, half-formed images upon which the fan imposes their own meaning, creating an obvious contradiction — The Fandom, as a surrogate for the artist, requires orthodoxy; content, its messages weakened by endless committees and focus groups, breeds heterodoxy.

Acts of fandom, then, become purity tests and sigils of inclusion. Shaping participation in The Fandom into proscribed acts allows The Fandom to paper over the heterodoxy. After all, if two people have the same tattoo, for example, it ceases to matter if they believe the tattoo represents the same thing for both of them.

They both get to pretend it does, they get to believe they are seen and to believe they see in return, they get to feel kinship.

They get The Fandom.

I think the key point is that it is an entirely different way of engaging with the media, and in fact, is its own entirely separate hobby from the original thing. As a teen I liked reading books, and I liked being in the fandom of certain books, but they filled different niches in my life. (These days I hardly ever read new books because I no longer have the "bored at school" niche to fill. Still love being in fandoms though.)

It might just be the kind of thing that only makes sense to the people who love it, like jogging for fun. It makes perfect sense to me - as a kid I defined myself by my media "obsessions", and I was overjoyed when I found the right part of the internet and realized that there were other people out there who enjoyed not just reading Warrior Cats, but roleplaying it, and daydreaming about it, and drawing the characters, and dressing up as them, and making up their own to write stories about. If you're filled to bursting with thoughts about a media (or a specific character or ship or trope or whatever), and it's the only thing you want to draw or write or talk about, it's a relief to find other people who will share that excitement with you rather than just tolerate it. But if you don't share that excitement then it is probably exhausting and odd and difficult to tolerate!

I think a lot of hobbies and interests end up with a casual tier and a weirdly fixated tier, which sometimes look similar to each other and sometimes look extremely different. There's occasional mending and tailoring, and there's having a spare room full of fabrics and threads and sewing notions. There's owning a cat, and there's collecting stickers and knickknacks that declare you a cat-lover. There's playing video games, and there's dedicating yourself to speedrunning one game very well.

I think that one's a pretty good comparison, actually - you may decide to speedrun a game for the same reasons many people enjoy playing it casually (innovative UI, interesting items, beautiful music, etc), or other, weirder reasons (not too much RNG, spectacular glitches, etc). You might speedrun a game because you've always loved it, or you might have only picked it up because you heard it was fun to speedrun. The way you're playing it prevents you from playing it normally - but it's a way that's fun and satisfying for you. Your opinions on the game may end up sounding super weird to people who aren't approaching it from the same PoV. You know it inside and out, yet, you're out of touch with the average fan and even the creator's intentions. The general balance of online conversation around the game may start to skew towards speedrunning it, just because who else is going to be talking about the same game, over and over, for years, a decade after it was released? But it's actually a rather small percentage of the people who play the game who choose to engage with it like this – a small percentage that forms a dedicated community. And that community evolves its own etiquettes and trends.

Overall... I just think it's fun smooshing familiar characters into new outfits and new relationships and new roles and situations and universes! Especially if other people are smooshing around with me too, so there's more ideas to play with. "How would x be different if y happened" or "if x did y, how would they do it" sorts of questions are very entertaining to me, and I like to read/write/draw/look/chat about the possible answers. (It also doesn't hurt that I've got that autistic "why would I switch to a new thing when I can keep enjoying the old familiar thing", but choosing to further my enjoyment through fandom remixes rather than simply rereading is personal taste.)

people find things that they get so invested in that it becomes a core part of their identity, and our current arc of humanity is very obsessed with Identity, whether it be having it or not having it. fandoms serve as community spaces specifically for media and entertainment, which on its own is already incredibly influential to shaping how we think and act, but works on an even grander scale when many people come together to discuss this aspect of their identity. and of course, the worse you feel about your life outside of your chosen identity, the more hostile and aggressive you become about defending and praising this thing that matters to you so much.

naturally, this kind of tunnel vision combined with the community aspect leads to a very different and very warped sense of human identity (and community) that creates an almost tribal sense of defensiveness towards this small thing that has become Very Integral for this group of individuals.

human beings do this with everything -- fandoms just make you realize how ridiculous we are as a species.

wait until u find out about the bible fandom

it's weird. i feel separated from fandom culture because i see people who care so much about good vibes and comfort characters and so on and so forth but ive never felt as if ive had any of those because it simply doesn't consume my life. i like things. i like things enough to write fanfic about them for fuck's sake. i just can't be in a fandom because i can't DEVOTE myself to A Thing without feeling like im giving up some self-determination.

I think a lot of it is also that since it's based on something that can just be like, dropped, there's no real threat of being Like That, either they win, or nothing happens because there's no actual reasonable mechanism for negative consequences that aren't just 'you don't get to talk to one segment of your media tastes anymore'

this is a slam dunk repost, chirasul, excellent writeup!

The other thing I notice about fandoms that can make them sort of gross to normal content enjoyers is they are almost entirely character focused. Almost every fandom views their chosen work as a source of characters to love as opposed to a piece of fiction with themes worth understanding.

Grappling with themes is something I think requires range of taste. Most stories have a limited number of them and being conceptual there’s more to learn through various points of view (in other words, trying other things). Characters however can very easily be morphed into an eternal companion or a pillar for content themselves.

Fandom is not simply a sense of community with other fans. It is a sense of community with characters. It is rules set by a character’s values. And purpose through devotion. It is a parasocial engine for fictional beings. Love and obsession for people who aren’t there and are less likely to hurt you. And if they do something you don’t like, it’s easy to say the writer got them wrong. This is the blorbo machine.