Topic for cultural analysis: Fandom, from an anthropological point of view. Like, what’s the “reason” for it? Why do people get obsessed/fanatic about random stuff? Is it possible to compare fandom to religion? Anyway, English is not my first language, so please forgive me if I’m not making sense xD
You’re making perfect sense! And as an aside, if anything I ever write is confusing, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. English is a stupid difficult language, with lots of words that have very specific connotations. I want my writing to be accessible, but sometimes I get carried away with obscure words. Fun fact, English is generally considered to have the largest vocabulary of any language. But I digress.
I can definitely see where you’re coming from, comparing fandom to religion. That’s where my mind first went as well when thinking about the cultural significance of fandom. I think they’re similar - to a point. “Fan” was initially a term applied to people who were really into sports. Baseball, specifically. As you mentioned, it comes from the word “fanatic”, which often has religious implications. In fact, according to Merriam-Webster,
“The adjective originally described behavior or speech that might result from possession by a god or demon, hence the earliest sense of the noun ‘a religious maniac’“
And we’re not the only one to make this connection between fandom and religion. Check out this screenshot from a BBC article I was reading:
I didn’t have to search through academic papers to find this comparison. It popped up as clickbait on a BBC article. This is, of course, assuming that we’re calling sports fans a type of fandom. Which it 100% is. According to Google the definition of fandom is
“the fans of a particular person, team, fictional series, etc., regarded collectively as a community or subculture.”
Sports fans are, by definition, part of a fandom. [aside from hello-tarpon: lol so use that the next time someone bothers you about going to cons or buying action figures… they’re paying through the nose to watch people play on a field or wear clothes/colors of their team: cosplaying] This is an important point when we’re trying to pinpoint the emergence of the modern day fandom, which is something I’ll get back to.
I’ve seen people point out that all those classical works of art of scenes from the Bible are essentially early fanart. Or that Greek plays of gods and heroes are are early fanworks. And they are, but they are also ways of expressing and practicing religion. This is where fandom and religion differ. For most fans, their fandom doesn’t have any spirituality associated with it. Fans may worship the ground on which their favorite actor or athlete stands, but they don’t usually believe that doing so will affect the spiritual world in their favor.
But in another way, fandom has a similar social function as religion: it provides the basis for a community to form around. This is something we see across a huge array of topics, not just fandom. Humans will form communities around absolutely anything they find in common with each other, be it religion, science, art, sports, history, experiences, etc. [aside from hello-tarpon: This is a well known fact we’ve realized about ourselves, just look at the “Earth is Space Australia” posts on tumblr, and a bit part of them is how humans ‘pack-bond’ to anything over anything, even something as simple as sharing space for a period of time.] Obviously, the incredible increase in communication technology in the past century or so plays a huge part in this. It was easier to form a community around a shared regional cultural trait (like a religion, or a local sports team) than around a specific interest that maybe one or two people other people in your geographical area were knowledgeable about. Now, even if only one other person in your immediate area likes the same thing you do, you can probably find a hundred more people who like that thing through the internet. It is also not new for people to become obsessed with a certain topic or person, but with instant access to the similarly enthused and unlimited content, it becomes a lot more evident.
Above photo: the Baker Street Irregulars, considered to be one of the oldest continually running literary fan clubs
In my research I found that what many people consider the first true non-sports fandom - Sherlock Holmes - occurred around the same time as the emergence of the middle class in Britain. This becomes relevant when we take into account the uptick in media aimed at this demographic. An increasingly literate populace and inexpensive methods of production led to the creation of dime novels, penny dreadfuls, and pulp fiction. While there is definitely a lack of quality in many of these sorts of publications, they appealed to a working middle class who were looking for quick, enjoyable escapism that didn’t require lots of in-depth analysis to understand. The prevalence of light fiction brought about a sense of cultural elitism in academic circles. Essentially, since the upper class could no longer claim to be better than everyone else (academically) just because they could read, they had to find new ways to claim superiority. One of the ways they did so was by differentiating “high culture” and the Western literary canon from “low culture” and - key terminology here - popular or “pop” culture (This wasn’t a new idea, by the way; look at the cultural conceptions of classical music compared to folk music (which could be a whole paper itself) for another, even older example of the social elite claiming to be culturally better than everyone else).
This is where we come into the modern definition of fandom. You’ll notice that people in general (well, outside of Tumblr) don’t refer to the “Shakespeare Fandom” or the “Quantum Science Fandom” or any other myriad of topics as fandom, despite the fact that a group of theoretical physicists at science convention almost certainly matches any description of a fandom. Only communities focused on pop culture get the label of fandom. And pop culture, despite large strides in being seen as legitimate as ‘high culture’, is still the culture of the lowest common denominator.
Fandom is a fascinating aspect of human socialization, but it isn’t special or different or new; the only reason fandom seems like such a recent phenomenon is because of newer technology that allows it to flourish across all social strata. People have been, and always will be, excited about things and want to find other people who are excited about the same things.
Thank you anon for the question! I hope I answered it to your satisfaction. There’s a lot more I could get into, but this thing is already three pages long. And thank you to @hello-tarpon for proofreading for me. She keeps texting me ideas for more topics I could cover in this. Stop it, O. You’re tempting me.
Rick Sanchez, Don Draper, and BoJack Horseman are three examples of a popular male character trope: the intelligent, talented, toxic, disconnected, detached man who fails to connect with others and is consistently and wildly self destructive in his quest to fill an emotional void with anything but human connection.
The problem with this character archetype lies with the fans, insofar as a lot of people, a specific subset of men in particular, miss the entire point of the character.
They’re so easily sucked in by the flashy veneer of masculine bravado on the surface of these damaged characters that they fail to understand why the characters are presented this way: you do not want to be like them. You are not supposed to identify with them positively or see them as someone to emulate, you are not supposed to sincerely root for them to win most of the time, they are antiheros.
In spite of being the protagonist Rick, Don, and BoJack are almost never the “good guy” in any given scenario, they are almost always selfishly motivated, and explicitly harming innocent people for their own gain. The rare moments of redemption usually don’t last.
Idolizing and lionizing these characters as an ideal or something to aspire to entirely misses the concept of the characters, and worse, celebrates behavior that is explicitly shown to be toxic and harmful.
If you identify as “a Rick” then the entire concept of the show has gone completely over your head. The creators of all three shows position their characters clearly, and get more blatant with each season.
To be clear, seeing negative traits in yourself and identifying with the struggle to improve them, or wanting these characters to change and grow is not what we’re referring to here, but rather the explicit support for and celebration of these characters as they are.
This isn’t even a critique of the characters themselves. All of whom are well written, interesting, and complex, but rather it’s a critique of how we see and interpret these characters. This archetype applies to many characters like Sherlock, House, and Archer, and is also mirrored in family members like Beth to Rick or Mycroft to Sherlock.
Liking these characters is fine. Enjoying them ia fine, but acknowledge what they are.
