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I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.
Sep 29, 2025
My goal with every show we put on Geek & Sundry is to make it that big of a success, not just within the video but within fandom itself.
Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
Just because you're part of 'Twilight' does not mean you're a superstar. It means that you're given the opportunity to maybe become one later if you work hard. Once fandom goes away, which it will very soon, it's all about having your priorities straight and working hard.
I think we're all fans, and I understand the whole world of fandom, because I am a fan.
Fandom is about fandom, it's a great big social club.
Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.
Fandom can keep something alive, and fandom can take it down.
With fantasy and sci-fi, it's based in a real fandom. You're presenting to experts, and their source material is really important to them.
To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness... Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degrees of experience - to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.
What writers of fantasy, science fiction, and much historical fiction do for a living is different from what writers of so-called literary or other kinds of fiction do. The name of the game in F/SF/HF is creating fictional worlds and then telling particular stories set in those worlds. If you're doing it right, then the reader, coming to the end of the story, will say, "Hey, wait a minute, there are so many other stories that could be told in this universe!" And that's how we get the sprawling, coherent fictional universes that fandom is all about.
The conventional wisdom of fandom is that you must give your fans anything they want. But I've never felt that that's a healthy attitude - and that comes from being a Star Wars fan.
I think Hollywood has seen what fandom can do for a project. You can definitely see that when you go to Comic-con.
Lord Of The Rings fandom was massive, worldwide, entrenched. Generally it had been part of the fans' life all their life, because they had it read to them as children; they'd become Tolkien students.
I will openly admit that I've never really followed hockey. Given my New England upbringing, I have always adhered to the Celtics, Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins mantra of professional sports fandom, but hockey was definitely the lowest sport on the totem pole - even when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.
I like how blogging emulates fandom because it's so completist and spontaneous. It really mirrors the way people listen to music, and I like that fluidity with online content.
It is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told.
Remove every barrier you can to fandom. A fan will be an evangelist for your work.
You'll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now.
I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself, though I was begged to be on every single TV show in existence. They want to blame entertainment? Isn't religion the first real entertainment? People dress up in costumes, sing songs and dedicate themselves in eternal fandom.
A big part of making music is the discovery aspect, is the surprise aspect. That's why I think I'll always love sampling. Because it involves combining the music fandom: collecting, searching, discovering music history, and artifacts of recording that you may not have known existed and you just kind of unlock parts of your brain, you know?
Tim Thornton's portrait of a pop culture obsession is so convincing that one can't help wishing that his fictional alt rock band actually existed, or suspecting that they did. The Alternative Hero is a weirdly compelling portrait of fanatic fandom which reads like High Fidelity at high volume.
For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.
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