Fandom: Creating Communities From Afar
One of the best experiences I’ve had recently was shortly after everything shut down. On St Patrick’s Day, Dropkick Murphys, one of my all-time favorite bands, live streamed a concert. Dropkick Murphys traditionally do a St Patrick’s Day concert in Boston, and this year they managed to do this for all their fans via the internet, as they couldn’t do a live concert. Not only was the concert a blast, one of the best parts of the whole thing was the deep sense of community I got during the concert. On the comments scroll next to the live performance people were saying hi from wherever they were from. I saw fans who were doing the exact same thing I was from Galway, Ireland to Indonesia, to all over the United States. Despite being alone in my apartment, I was as far from alone as possible.
This experience, and the ongoing social distancing in made me think about the importance and value of the community part of fandom in a way that I really hadn’t before. All forms of community are important, but right now, fan communities might be both the most easily accessible and really what we all kind of need right now.
One of the great thing about fan communities is that they are already online and can easily be a physically remote community. For me, the vast majority of my fandom-related stuff is online. It’s where I read fan fiction, watch fan vids, read up about bands/sports teams/franchises (etc.) and, of course, write about fandom here.
While the old-fashioned and derogatory images of fans paint a picture of people holed up in homes, only talking to people online are extremely reductive, weirdly that is exactly what we need to do these days for the sake of everyone. We are all supposed to stay home and use the internet to communicate.
You don’t have to be an active participant to be a part of the community. I’ve never created my own fan content or even commented on other people’s. But I love watching and reading, and more importantly, I feel like a part of a community. Community is what you make into, and while it’s taken me a long time to come to terms with my fandom shame and embrace the idea that I’m part of various fan communities it’s been really positive for me, even if my actual actions haven’t changed much.
Fandom communities are, at their best, about celebrating a thing that you love with other people who love it too. Yes there is toxicity and trolls and negativity, but that is true in any large group of people. The fun parts of fandom and the positive people in it are often great and supportive of each other. And honestly, that kind of celebration and to an extent even retreat into something that makes you happy is a pretty necessary counterbalance to everything else in the world right now.
None of this is to suggest we eschew other communities or to say that fan communities are better that some other thing – as always my position is you do you and be understanding of others. But, if you are lacking a sense of community or are feeling isolated, fandom could really help right now. Everyone is a fan of something, whether it is baseball or cooking or British murder mysteries, and I’m sure there is already an online fan community for it. We all need to feel connected to other people, now more than ever, and we all need to find things that make us happy. Hopefully fandom can bring all of us both of those things, even if only for an evening.
