Last week, I started watching Attack On Titan about 13 weeks after everybody else got into it. Finally, all the memes on my Tumblr dashboard started to make sense!
Things were crystal clear for a hot second, up until Free! began airing last week. Overnight, posts about Titans were replaced by posts about swimming. It’s the circle of fandom, the rise and fall of our obsessions within obsessions.
Attack on Titan and Free! both just happen to have large female fan bases, making the switch that much more sudden and apparent. But usually, we’re only marginally aware of the drift of fandom. A feeling in the back of our minds like, “Weren’t bronies a big deal in just a few months ago?” or “Has it really been a year since I last played Skyrim?”
What makes fandom drift interesting to me is that it mimics newsgathering. Some scholars describe our news cycle as a spotlight, highlighting one thing for a brief time before moving onto the next. It’s why you’re not still hearing updates about victims of the Boston bombings. It’s why the front page changes overnight, or every hour online.
The thing about identifying as a geek, nerd, or otaku is that we tend to have a lot of interests under the same umbrella. We’re always looking for the Next New Thing, then the thing after that, and then nostalgia for the first thing, making it new again.
What’s more unusual is sticking with one fandom for long past its air date. It tickles me how my friend and colleague, Aja Romano, is still participating in a fandom for two side characters in Inception, a movie that is now three years old. My husband, too, prefers to keep his fandom in the 20th century, re-watching Patlabor and Star Wars. It took a lot of convincing to get him to try Attack on Titan.
But refusing to keep up with fandom drift results in more social consequences than failing to keep up with the news. If you can tell me about the unrest that’s going on in Egypt right now, you’re in the informed minority. But if you don’t want to know that Snape kills Dumbledore (and I’m keeping my example dated on purpose), you can’t even sign on to Twitter or Tumblr without being spoiled. Plus, as XKCD once pointed out, by the time you do catch on, your friends will find you infuriating.
When you join a fandom, you become part of an obsessive, intimate—and temporary—community. If you get in at the onset, you’re getting the best possible fandom experience. You get to talk with big name fans before they become special guests at conventions, participate in the creation of the fandom’s first memes and fan works, and enjoy being on the inside just as everyone else is starting to catch on.
But if you get into it late, like I did with Attack on Titan, you’ll just be browsing a digital ghost town that’s left behind in a swimming anime’s wake.
9 Comments.
What I find infuriating is the fickle “gotta have the new thing” attitude of fandom, the feverish, consumerist desire to hop on the latest bandwagon before it’s left town, the idea that one can’t just watch and enjoy a TV show, but that “fandom” must involve writing inexplicable relationship-based fanfic, wasting everybody’s time with supposedly hilarious image macros, and generally burning through all your enthusiasm for a thing as quickly as possible. There’s no room left for people to discover, to enjoy, to contemplate, to seek out the unfamiliar and find its worth – it’s on to the Next Big Thing before you’re left behind. Don’t be left behind! You might not get all the references shoved in your face by your “internet friends”, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that!
Or would you?
Why not enjoy a TV show on your own schedule and quit worrying if you’re keeping up with the Joneses?
I happened on this post and comment, and it certainly resonated with me… if in part because I might still be stewing a bit over some recent instances of not having “picked the winner” beforehand and watched everyone else wind up complaining about things, and in another part because I can remember back when I might have been dimly aware other people might be buying the same books as me, but of course I’d never be able to talk to them about it.
Isn’t this the unfortunate direction that the internet has taken us though? Long are the days of waiting for the morning and evening paper, or even the morning or evening news. We have smartphones that might as well inject news directly into your veins. You can take a…uh…bathroom break at work at check out what’s happening in the news all the while, and without rustling papers disturbing the guy/gal next to you.
But with entertainment media, it’s becoming more and more a collectors market where disposable media like Two and a Half Men and CSI are the norm and shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad are brushed to the side.
In anime, what was the last big hit? The one that has stuck around and is still sticking around? From /r/animesuggest and /r/anime, I get that it’s the moe relationship shows like Toradora or interesting shows like Steins;Gate or high octane shows like Attack on Titan. But the oldest thing there is from 2009. We can’t suggest something like Gundam (that’s not Unicorn) or perhaps even Kare Kano because they’re too old. No one cares unless it’s happening RIGHT NOW.
Swimming Anime had the anime community in a collective uproar for a week, and then it just seemed to stop, didn’t it? And then the announcement for Free! started it again and then its premiere seemed to simmer it down when everyone realized they were being unreasonable people.
This disposability is especially true in your cookie cutter moe shows, where you get the character archetypes instead of the characters. As long as the hair is a different color and the archetype doesn’t match the boob size of the last character, you can sell new figures for it and new DVD/BD for it.
Again, it seems like we will always move toward whatever the NEXT BIG THING is (if we hadn’t already done that long ago). So where’s the continued appreciation for long-time greats like Revolutionary Girl Utena? It’s gone by the wayside, replaced by another show with a strong female character.
This is the price of being involved in fandom sometimes, sigh.
I think a friend told me best – it’s very difficult to find friends who aren’t always about the hottest trends. Many of them will be almost always be on the bandwagon.
For someone like me, I read the most obscure manga out there and I don’t know too many people who have the same tastes. It’s funny, isn’t it?
@Tony funny story about this. When I was in 9th grade my friend told me about this great manga called One Piece. I was hooked! But every time I tried to bring it up to people, they’d never heard of it and weren’t interested. Frustrated, I stopped reading… and look at the One Piece franchise now. ARRGH!
I know you write a lot about fandom, and I am not exactly anti-fandom but I often find fandom very strange. I like a LOT of geeky stuff, for varying reasons, but I rarely ever get obsessed with something.
In my experience, most of the people involved in fandom tend to be female. I’m not saying fandom is an exclusively female thing, but most of the people I know in real life who are involved in fandoms are female (Hetalia and Homestuck specifically). Most of the guys I know will rarely spend the amount of time talking about a single specific thing the way some of my female fandom friends do.
@Rowango, I’ve observed that the people who are most likely to get swept into fandom are the people who are able to build the strongest bonds with fictional characters. In my experience, those people aren’t limited to one gender, but it does seem like lady-centric fandoms (Twilight, The Avengers, Sherlock, etc.) tend to get a lot of mainstream notice.
“temporary”, you say. i begin to cry. i have been in the one direction and harry potter fandoms for over three and a half years, the atla fandom for over six years, thg fandom for over two. i sure hope this ends soon.
Your life must be full of ships and tears! Fandom L Y F E