Your mission should you choose to accept it

[firecat]

This is coming up for me as a result of a combination of things, including: having started to read Star Trek the Reboot fanfic, conversations I heard at Wiscon, and posts I saw today, including this one.

Describe science fiction fandom.
Describe media fandom.
What fandoms do you consider yourself to belong to or feel some affinity with?
What terms do you use to describe them?

Comments

[serene]

Off the top of my head:

I read some science fiction, but I don't consider myself a fan. There's some divide there, similar to the divide between "I like to watch baseball games" and "I'm a baseball fan". That divide, I guess, is between enjoying an activity, and enjoying the culture surrounding the activity and having a feeling of belonging with others who enjoy that culture. So I guess I think of science fiction fandom as what people belong to when they like science fiction AND the culture surrounding the reading(/watching/whatevering) of science fiction.

(Not a member of any fandoms, so I skipped the rest.)

[flarenut]

Same here. I used to read a whole lot of SF, still read a fair amount. Enjoy conversations about same, but have over the years been frightened away by a certain kind of hardcore competitive fan type whose non-fandom life seems minimal. (I know that's not everyone or even a majority; it's more that I want to avoid the temptation...)

[firecat]

hardcore competitive fan type

Say more? Do you mean, say, people who learn Klingon and can quote the dialogue from every Star Trek episode? Or something else? I'm not sure what you mean by "competitive".

[flarenut]

Not just can, but do. (And perhaps that's the dividing line between frightening and nonfrightening fen...) And competitive, well, just competitive. Happens in all walks of life, all kinds of fannishness -- people who seem to have to establish some kind of hierarchy of who knows more or is better connected or has more rare items in a collection. Of course, this also speaks to me as a committed dilettante, knowing a little bit about as many things as possible, but not much about anything...

[firecat]

Not just can, but do.

OK, that makes sense.

I don't seem to have run into that many of those. If they are really competitive about their singular focus, then they probably aren't interested in me, since I'm also a dilettante, and not competitive in very many things.