Snowflake Challenge 02026 #3: Love

[silveradept]

snowflake_challenge has posted prompt #3, asking us to talk about the things we love about the communities that we are part of, or about the properties we form our communities around.

Challenge #3:

Write a love letter to fandom. It might be to fandom in general, to a particular fandom, favourite character, anything at all.

There are some fandoms where the medium of the execution is the way that the fandom develops, for particular and specific art styles, or the choice of audio as a medium, or the cinematography, but all of those things are replicable. And if you believe in the monomyth, or the idea that there are only a limited number of stories to tell (even if there are infinite variations upon those stories to tell with), you will eventually encounter situations where the same story is being told, or the same visual style is used, or similar, and one of them is something you delight in, and the other is something that just doesn't spark for you. And that's okay. Most communities that form around the work itself dissolve if the focus remains steadfastly on the work itself. Eventually you run out of characters, runtime, or works in the series and there's nothing more there to analyze, at least not until some other tidbit appears as a lost archive, or an unfinished work, or other similar bit to be added to the canon.

What usually happens in communities that stick around, instead, is that communities form around the work, and discussing the work, or the creator, or the actors, or the characters, some facet of the work, but then it becomes a community of people who are all gathered around the same topic. As humans, we are interested in not just waht is shown, but what is hidden, what was left behind, what inferences can be drawn from things not explicitly laid out for us, and what evidence we can gather to support our contentions. Sometimes these pathways are laid out for us by the creator, sometimes fans create these pathways themselves.

Anne Rice was wrong: there is no "wrong perspective" to interrogate a text from. There are perspectives that are more supported by and less supported by the evidence presented, and perspectives that we agree with more and perspectives we agree with less, but there are no wrong perspectives when it comes to a reader and a fandom. Ngozi Ukazu, creator of Check, Please!, mentioned The Premise (the initial term to describe Kirk/Spock, couched this way because many of the Star Trek fans at the time were hostile to the idea that Kirk and Spock might be in a committed sexual relationship) at a convention appearance not that long ago, and there's plenty of supporting evidence in the stories themselves that this is so, even if it's a relationship that would receive no screen time, since the viewing audience would not accept it. Or, as is likely the case, the studio would not accept it nor allow it to be broadcast. Alex Hirsch has done quite a bit to showcase what Standards and Practices will object to in an animated series for children mature enough to understand the references, but you can find plenty of other examples for ND Stevenson, Rebecca Sugar, and just about anyone who has had to fight Standards and Practices to include explicit queerness, or even implicit queerness, in their shows. What gets broadcast, or printed, always goes through editors and other people, whose job is not only to make sure that there aren't spelling, grammatical, or plot and consistency errors, but who also act toward trying to determine whether this work will can be sold, in what condition, and to what audience.

You could make the argument that a fandom is a group of people who come together over the absence of something in a canon, whether that absence has to do with a lack of completeness of knowledge (or artifacts) or has to do with the absence of exploration of a character, their history, their relationships, their situation, and so on. The transformative fandom aspects tend to focus on the latter part, and that lack in the canon, whether because of not having enough time to describe a complete life, or the interference of Standards and Practices, or whatever other reason, is the fount of a nearly-infinite number of permutations of works that attempt to fill that lack in a particular way. Because that number of permutations is nearly-infinite, there's not going to be a situation where someone reaches the end and has experienced all the possible ways of doing something, ranks their top choices, and then moves on to something else. Instead, there is creation, curation, sharing, ranking, archiving, and all of the rest of the actions that go along with creation and preservation of the things that someone wants to make and/or keep on any given permutation. AO3 has millions of users and millions more works, and their expansive policy and attempts to absorb other archives as they are shutting down means only that they can continue to showcase those nearly-infinite permutations to anyone who is interested in seeing them. (This is why they know they have to have rigorous finding aids and a well-documented taxonomy, because a person who is looking for a specific kind of permutation knows what they want and will likely be dissatisfied with anything that isn't squarely in the bullseye. They have to be able to sort millions of potential documents down to a handful that meet exacting criteria. This is why the thing I will complain the most about AO3, outside of policy decisions, are decisions they do or don't make about searching and tagging, because the structure of the data is what facilitates or hinders the correct documents being found.) There's no point in which someone runs out of things to consume that isn't basically "nobody has created anything new lately and I've read the rest."

I love the infinite creativity of humans, even if I will swear a blue streak when that creativity hinders or harms me in some way, or exposes some vulnerability or edge case that I hadn't thought of before and now have to take into account. I love that we're such pattern-matching creatures that we can see faces in collections of objects, even though that pattern-matching nature of ours leads us into conspiracy theories and ship wars, each of us believing we have the evidence we need to prove things definitively, regardless of what anyone else says. We take in wild ideas, AUs, shifts great and small, or we examine the unturned stones of the canon, and out of all of it, we write new stories, and each of us creates things that are unique to ourselves, even if we are all using the same ingredients or base premises to work with. It's the kind of thing where even an LLM running on its most unhinged is unable to come up with some of the ideas that fandom has on a regular basis, and would be entirely unable to execute in the manner that fandom does on the regular. And makes collections thereof. And archives, and lore documents, and an entire academic journal devoted to works, and fans, and studying all of this. It's the kind of thing where you realize you are one tiny part of a much larger everything than you would have originally imagined. It's the kind of thing that has people celebrating their fractional Hugos in a tongue-in-cheek manner, and then in a manner designed to deliberately clown upon and aggravate the person or people that are taking themselves way too seriously.

The best thing I like about fandom is that it grows and evolves and produces new stories and new interpretations of stories, and new tropes and new ways of telling stories and smashing them together. The next best thing about fandom is how many people there are in it who are there to have a good time and to make community with others. Yes, there are always going to be people who feel like they have to defend their territory against all comers, or who loudly proclaim that their way is the only way and all others must yield, but most fans that I've encountered seem to be less concerned with purity, fortresses, or defense and are instead more concerned with community, mutual aid, sharing, and trying to encourage people who are in the fandom to stay in it or to getr even deeper into it. Maybe I just have good people around me and I've avoided the people who want to drag me into wars, but even if that's the case, the last thing I love about fandom (for this entry, anyway) is that it tends toward self-correction, and with time and maturity, most fen who stay, grow in ways that make their works better and their communities better.

Comments

[scribblemoose]

This is such a good exploration of the complexities of fandom communities and why they're so valuable, despite the difficulties. Real food for thought, thank you.

[silveradept]

Glad it could provide some thinking.

[teres]

As I'm not in any fandom, I don't have much to add, but I did like this piece, and it gives me a good idea of what is attractive about fandom.

[silveradept]

Informative, at least. That's a victory.

[teres]

You're certainly good at conveying things I don't know about much yet.