Media Fandom - Fanlore

The term media fandom first appeared in the 1970s. It is an umbrella term used to describe an eclectic assortment of individual fan communities that share certain values, practices, and vocabulary.

Scope

Although there is no strict rule about what types of source texts produce fandoms that are included in media fandom, media fandom is generally used to refer to fan communities around individual movies or television shows produced in the West. Unlike science fiction fandom, media fandom is not defined by the genre of its sources. Media fen have also adopted books, comics, video games, anime/manga, and real people as sources for their fanworks. There is frequently a culture clash during this adoption process if the new source is a threshold fandom independent of media fan tradition.

Fan activities characteristic of media fan communities include writing and reading fan fiction (anathema to many sf fans), creating fanart and fannish music videos, and engaging in meta discussion. A support infrastructure has also grown up around these activities: zine publishing, circuit libraries, rec lists, archives, beta readers, etc.

Historical Origins

One view of media fandom is that it broke off from science fiction fandom with the popularity of (and, perhaps, most importantly, the cancellation of) Star Trek. Those who were to become media fans were both more likely to be female than the male-dominated science fiction community and, also, more interested in the characters and relationships depicted on the television series than they were by the futuristic technology it offered.^[1] (Although there were plenty of men enthusiastic about Star Trek, these fans were more likely to be accepted into the existing sf fandom.^[2])

The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a television show that went on the air two years before Star Trek, is also referenced as a possible starting point.^[3] Star Trek fans mingled with Man From U.N.C.L.E. fans and then went on to adopt both Star Wars and, in what proved the most definite break from science fiction fandom, Starsky & Hutch (a cop show set in a contemporary analogue of Los Angeles) as source texts for their fannish engagement.

References

1. ↑ Francesca Coppa, "A Brief History of Media Fandom," in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, eds. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 48.
2. ↑ Camille Bacon-Smith, Science Fiction Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 112.
3. ↑ St. crispin's, Where Fandom Began, July 3, 2009.