In a conversation a few days ago, my best friend, Rose, asked me what should have been a very simple question. “What fandom do you plan to focus on for class?”Â
I knew Rose’s answer before they told me, our fandom discussions have been a highlight of my life every few days for going on four years, and I knew that mine—as it seems so many of my answers in life tend to be—was much less concise. “It doesn’t feel right to pick one, but I already know my lens,” I tell them in an Instagram voice note, an on-going “whenever you’re around” conversation that after about a year of use must amount to hundreds of hours worth of discussion, nearly all involving our fandoms and fan culture at large.
Me 'n Rose (Bestie in Fandom)
I have identified as a “fangirl” for as long as I can remember, long enough that I still can’t always bring myself to use the more widely accepted term of “stan”, long enough that although I was officially too young for an account I have vivid memories of 2013-15 tumblr culture, long enough that despite only being twenty-one I have earned the term “fandom elder” entirely on accident. Maybe I was six? When my older sister Abby introduced me to a song called Fearless, only for me to be paying out the nose to see Taylor sing it live fifteen years later on the Eras Tour. I might’ve been eight, when this madman in a bow tie lit up the hospital room where I was getting cancer treatments. I definitely couldn’t have been older than eleven, though, by then I had a tumblr account, a rotating cast of dedicated fandom OC’s, and a t-shirt reading “Booknerd” with the classic Harry Potter-Percy Jackson-Hunger Games “Big Three” logo right beneath. By the time I entered middle school I was a self declared expert on the television shows Doctor Who, Glee, Star Trek, and Criminal Minds, and had read (or rather listened) to the Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Lord of the Rings series’ over a hundred times through, etv. There’s not much else to do when you’re a chronically ill child, stuck in bed, alone, and desperate to live without having to leave the hospital.Â
Me, at 12, thinking my Eleventh Doctor shirt was hot shit
Although it is arguably the least interesting branch I hit while falling down the tree of intersectionality, as the child of lesbian parents, as an ethnically Jewish person, and as a someone who was born—and has spent my entire life—chronically ill and disabled, my identity as a woman has always been the one that has effected my fandom experience the most. (I must acknowledge here that I can only speak to my experience as one cisgender white woman, and that the experiences of those who are women of color, trans, nonbinary, and/or not attracted to men, are invariably going to be not only much different, but in many ways much more difficult than my own.)
For as long as I can remember, I have navigated the world with a hyperawareness of gender-based violence and discrimination, I think it’s impossible not to do so when growing up in an all-girl family, much less one where both my moms had experienced said violence, and where they both used fandom to cope themselves. If there was a time I did not, it was before the age of ten, when I was a victim of CSA at the hands of the medical system and the men who run it; to this day I can’t listen to the particular Lord of the Rings audiobook I had playing when it happened without bursting in to tears. It is imperative, in my view, to understand my hyperawareness of misogyny, to understand my experience with fandom. I came in to fan communities, and spent much of my formative time in them, in the proliferation of the peak NLog (not like other girls) years.
Who run the world? I mean not my family of girls...but it would be cool if we did
Bombarded with memes, texts posts, and a general atmosphere that the only “correct” way to exist as a girl, and especially a young girl (specifically one who was twelve pretending to be fifteen), was to not be like other girls. I must not be “shrill”, overly argumentative, disdainful of the casual sexism that lurks underneath the surface of many fan spaces, I must not bad-mouth venerated male creators (bad mouthing, of course, including questioning why it is so unreasonable to wish for a television writing team with more than a single woman), I must not overtly enjoy things like makeup, but I must still be effortlessly pretty (preferably with blue “orbs” and a red messy bun), I must not like pink (purple is usually fine though), and I must not actually say I am not like other girls, but must look upon their love of Taylor Swift, Gossip Girl, One Direction, and Twilight with disdain all the same.
This avalanche of expectations, reinforced by my online companions in fandom communities, as well as by my “enemies”, those who sent anonymous messages that I should kill myself for committing the great sin of writing a Doctor Who Jack/Nine/Rose “Makeover” one shot, caused an inordinate amount of cognitive dissonance, and was often deeply isolating. In my “real life” girls who shared my interests in clothes, makeup, sewing, and my nearly decade-long membership in Girl Scouts were not interested in talking about X-Men comics, Star Trek Expanded Universe novels, or the latest episode of Doctor Who. In my online world I could get my head bitten off in an instant simply for saying I thought it was unfair “girly girls” were usually portrayed as vapid and dumb in series like Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, and god forbid you have the audacity to like Molly Hooper on Sherlock or worse, Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones.Â
An edit I made circa 2015 of my favorite Sansa Stark quote
Over the years my involvement in fandoms have waxed and waned, I’ve been bullied out of three (including anonymous death and rape threats in two and getting doxxed at the tender age of thirteen over one), Doctor Who, Marvel, and Taylor Swift. All for different reasons, but all really coming down to the idea I like “traditionally feminine” things too much, whether that be “pretty” actors like Matt Smith, “feminist” heroes like Captain Marvel, or “girly” albums like Lover. And yet, I keep coming back, I came back after the Game of Thrones finale (and have two over 100k viewed fanfics on AO3 to show for it), I came back for the thirteenth and fourteenth (no, I will not call him fifteen) Doctors, and have even tentatively poked my head back into the Avatar the Last Airbender and Percy Jackson fandoms with their respective renaissances.
BEHOLD A very dumb photo montage I made at the ripe old age of thirteen of aforementioned pretty actor (I still quote "I was called dumbo as a child" on a regular basis)
It’s easy to ask why I continue to subject myself to the “fandom experience”, and in turn to chalk it up to the chemical processes involved in my ADHD, my desperation for a community I can participate in despite my chronic pain and fatigue, or simply the fact I got involved so young I don’t know how to live without them. I think it’s a lot simpler than that, though, I think it’s because I process the world through writing, and because above else I love to write. Whether it be fan fiction, meta, or original works branching off from the questions the media I love continually invites me to ask, writing is my great passion, and the fandoms and franchises I fall in love with are the ones that spark my motivation to write; whether I’m analyzing Taylor Swift lyrics, breaking down the celebrity culture I’ve watched for over a decade in my original novel, or writing fan-fiction where once in a while I still love a good makeover montage. Fandom introduced me to writing, writing became the way I process the world, and in the circular nature of life, writing is what will always bring me back to fandom. Â
That was a long post, thanks for reading, here's the best meme anyone has ever made for me (everyone say thank you Rose)
