Journal of Fandom Studies, The - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2021

In fan studies scholarship, the term ‘young fans’ tends to refer to university-age fans, thereby often overlooking school-age children and the meaning of fandom among future generations of fans. While it can be difficult to study children due to issues around access and consent, it is important that we do – they can tell us a lot about not only where fan cultures are right now but also where they might be heading in the future. In this article, we offer the results of a large-scale survey presented to approximately 1700 children aged 7–17. The answers reveal why it is important for media studies scholarship to develop new methods for understanding children’s media consumption behaviours. First, despite the ‘mainstreaming’ of fandom in popular culture, our research evinces that the traditional depictions of fans as ‘unruly’ or ‘obsessive’ persist. And second, these young fans are not viewing themselves as fans of specific objects, but rather as ‘fans’ first and foremost, with the specific object of fandom unstated. Fan studies’ traditional view of fandom as being devoted to one thing needs expansion.

This article explores why composer Richard Wagner has such a passionate cult following, by employing the ‘family resemblances’ of cult texts identified by Matt Hills and, in the process, uncovers the elemental threads embedded into his work. Taking up John Durham Peters’s call for an elemental approach to media, I argue that Wagner’s treatment of art as nature allowed for the erasure of mediation. By insisting that his products were of an organic nature, he was thus able to keep the spectre of commercialization at bay. In turn, this encouraged the formation of a cult fandom. Finally, I make the case for further study of both fans of high culture and how we might trace the emergence of cultish modes of consumption to the nineteenth century.

The genealogy stretching from Romanticism to the tortured poets of the emotional hardcore music scene is by now well established. Emotional hardcore, or emo, is invested in the construction of the usually White male artist, a sensitive and creative being subject to a great deal of suffering – as a result both of his artistic nature and of the external forces aligned against him. The European Romantics invented the concept of artist as cultural icon – Lord Byron is often considered Britain’s first celebrity. He was also, not coincidentally, Britain’s first literary vampire. This article utilizes a discursive analysis based in open coding to consider emo fandom’s obsession with the figure of the vampire, especially what emo fans – who are mostly girls – have done with it in fanfic. Considering the gendered genealogy of the vampire, and the problematic gender politics of the emo scene, I explore how the constraints and opportunities of these discursive structures influence the ways emo fans imagine vampires, who appear so often in their writing. Picking out key themes of sex, race and the ethics of the vampire inherited from both emo fandom and vampire literature generally, I argue that the selected sample demonstrates a transformative impulse towards race and sex, which is ultimately still contained by the overarching discursive structures within which artists operate.

The purpose of this research was to explore the dress practices of females who wear fan fashion connected to multiple sci-fi/fantasy fandoms in a variety of everyday social contexts. Data from semi-structured, online interviews were analysed in relation to identity theory and the concept of appearance labour using NVivo qualitative analysis software and the constant comparison method. While the data revealed general motivations for wearing fan fashion, it also showed that participants expressed their fan identity across formal, semi-formal and professional settings through wearing fan fashion. Participants also alleviated appearance labour by carefully choosing specific types of fan fashion appropriate for certain social settings and audiences (i.e. conspicuous vs. inconspicuous). This research provided more insight into the trend of fan fashion and led to the development of a taxonomy in which types of fan fashion are classified in terms of their conspicuousness.

In 2012, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (LBD) began to reimagine Austen’s beloved novel, Pride and Prejudice, for the twenty-first century by conveying the narrative through multiple digital media platforms. LBD centred on a series of YouTube video diaries ostensibly uploaded by Lizzie Bennet, a 20-something graduate student. The LBD narrative eventually expanded to include four complementary YouTube channels, thirteen interconnected Twitter feeds, Tumblr posts, Facebook profiles and numerous social media interactions and ‘conversations’ between the narrative’s characters and its fans. One of the key features of LBD was how the narrative actively invited fans and readers to participate and interact with the characters through its multiple media platforms, providing fans with the sense that their contributions to the narrative mattered and creating what Sarah K. Day has termed ‘narrative intimacy’. According to Day, texts with narrative intimacy ‘reflect, model, and reimagine intimate interpersonal relationships through the disclosure of information and the experience of the story as a space that the narrator invites the reader to share’. This article explores how LBD used the interactive and participatory functions of YouTube, Twitter and Tumblr to create a deeply immersive narrative experience for fans and how that immersion helped contribute to the development of LBD’s narrative intimacy through the use of Lizzie and Lydia as vulnerable narrators. Drawing on results from the author’s mixed-methods survey of LBD fans, this article highlights the lasting affective attachment fans have to the narrative and how their LBD experience reinforced their connection to Austen’s original novel.