hang on, i gotta talk to chat.

Basic Transformational Fandom

Transformational fandoms tend to kick off in media that provides a fun sandbox or (even when it’s good) leaves a little bit more to be desired. From there, the people left wanting start to group up and create markets for the creation of fanwork, and eventually someone puts hand to keyboard to make something. People sometimes think that transformational fandom is recent but the truth is that Fanficiton Fanzines stretch back well beyond the creation of the internet, people have been craving transformational content and art for a long time, and are very stubborn when it comes to finding each other to do it.  

Speaking from personal experience, even though fandoms often reliably form around media, I haven’t participated in the fandom for every piece of media I’ve consumed, so I know what it’s like to be interested and disinterested in the fandoms around what I watch/read/ect. There’s been times where I was very into a fandom in a traditional “I want as much of this as possible and also X and Y to smooch” way, times when I was kind of put off by what a given fandom was doing so I took the pass, and times when I was more interested in what the fandom was putting out than the actual content itself. It can take some shopping around to find a spot where what a market has lines up with what appeals to you.

So there’s… a bit of a leap between the usual premise of transformational fandom and rpf spaces. My understanding of the people who pipeline from regular fiction to RPF is they develop the instincts in one context and then they just retain and use that capacity when they switch to another. That sounds a bit slippery-slope but I mean that they just don’t have to start from scratch if they came through more traditional and less taboo fandoms. People still tend to draw the line because RPF is still mostly taboo (the fact that this fandom has such a large, open presence of it is wild to me, I’m really not used to it but such is the fine line of Minecraft roleplay) but some people find it easier to cross because of their background.

The Fantasy Market

There’s something of a midway between fic and conversation that doesn’t get covered as much even though it feels like the missing link between regular idle fantasising and RPF. People tend to want peer-to-peer contact with other people who share the same interests as them, and exchanging ideas or scenarios surrounding those interests is a go-to for that.

The line between trying to find the truth vs feeling out an appealing scenario brings be back around again to my imago post, so if people wanted to collect their “parasocial relationships are the devil” ticket here’s an easy one. You may have seen these kinds of posts around—“[name] would like a teddy bear. He would pretend he didn’t at first but eventually he would become the type of guy to get all the way out of bed if it fell on the floor in the middle of the night to go get it.” It’s not fic, but it’s a longform hypothetical that someone would post to their peers, maybe to get a full on conversation going about how much milage [name] would get out of a stuffed animal. From there they get to feel closer to their fellow fans, and also feel like they understand a bit more about the person they’re all interested in, since pattern finding is a big part of human cognition in general and it's fun to do it together.

On the hormonal end of the spectrum, thirstposting is a deceptively complicated art, somewhere between personal venting and posting for the people around them to resonate with. I know people mostly like to act like thirst tweets are always embarrassing and unwelcome, but honestly having a brother in arms in Times Of Great Thirst usually bonds a community pretty tightly.  

Self-inserts and X readers have never been my thing, but they’re an important link in the evolutionary chain of how we get from one person daydreaming to a whole community of readers and writers. There’s a market for good ideas about a certain person or situation even if they aren’t fleshed out, but a few steps in you start looking at content that looks more like fiction. A good offshoot of this step that people don’t often talk about or understand in these terms were the original POV tiktoks and concept/Imagine blogs. The people love a good scenario, and environments where some of the best imaginations are grinding out content to fuel your daydream can be great for that.  

I think that the people who didn’t enter through ‘regular’ transformational fandom probably found their way through this door instead. Fantasy tweet becomes thirst tweet becomes thread fic becomes wattpad, graduates to ao3 maybe, whoops we’re reading novels now.

The Reader / Writer Market

I use the word ‘market’ a little differently than some others might when talking about this stuff. A while ago I started poking around Economic Anthropology in a very amateurish way, because that was the first place I came across an idea that managed to line up with the majority of my fandom experience, the idea that ‘economics’ are the dynamics of human exchange based on wants and needs, not just the study of money and assets. Money only covers a fraction of the number of exchanges that happen in life, non-monetary economy is what I find really interesting, and what I relate to parts of fandom as. Think of the strangely elaborate systems that seem to reliably pop up when people want something, I have seen amazingly complex fandom coordination from young teenagers as long as the desire and the drives were there. Economics gets a lot more saucy once you start to relate to it as a study of human desire and how those desires get met.

The people want what the people want, and in fandom they often want more of the thing they’ve invested in. It’s often not enough, or even very appealing at all, to write something “original” or removed from the scene when the party is in the scene itself. Some people probably give it a go, but truth be told they often don’t get seen as often as work with the built-in audience that a fandom has/is. The goal probably isn’t even to be seen by a lot of people, but to show stuff to the people who would be most interested in that stuff, even if there’s only five people who are invested. People get content, author gets validation and engagement, it’s a little loop that’s a lot harder to get to in the cold world of original publishing. Most people don’t really want to become career writers anyway, they want to see their favorite boys smooch in the form of the kind of stories they read, which are likely already fic.

What is a duo/group name? - A "duo name" is a name commonly used as shorthand to refer to two (or more) people, typically used in a platonic context, as an alternative to the more ship-inspired mashing together of names. They're generally called duo names because most of them are for a duo, and each one often has a name such as [word] duo. Generally though, similar names like trio or group names fall under the umbrella as well.

How can a duo name be bad? - There is a severe oversaturation of duo names that are either for two creators who hardly interact, or they're too vague to know who it's referring to, or the name refers to an instance or interaction that's so obscure most people don't know it, or sometimes they're just... downright bad. Some are apparent why they're bad.