Zach WeinersmithMore interesting question: Is obsessive fandom a new thing, or is it just a new form of an old thing? The thing that feels different in my lifetime is the move from media obsession as a quirky geek thing to something like a serious identity category that lots of people possess.
Tommy Palmer@ZachWeinersmith Music fandom has been like that since The Beatles. Star Trek has been that way for decades too.
๐ฅtorstein๐ฅ@tommyp @ZachWeinersmith for music it has existed at least since Liszt
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisztomania
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisztomania
Alexis Deveria@ZachWeinersmith Probably with the internet it's easier to find a lot of people interested in the same thing, resulting in it being more socially acceptable to have such obsessions.
Stuart Langridge@ZachWeinersmith new form of an old thing. Consider how people feel about sports teams, for example; that's not a new thing at all. The Romans were obsessive about whether you followed the Greens or the Blues in chariot racing. I'm not sure whether this level of identification about non-sports things -- knitting, D&D, Marvel films, woodworking, whatever -- is actually on the rise, or whether it's now more publicly acceptable to proudly declare it. But I don't think it's new.
-๐๐๐- (has pronouns)I think it came along with the concept of "teenager", so less than two hundred years old.
Jonathan HendryThere were the Blues and Greens in Byzantium but that was more like fanatical soccer hooliganism.
Oggie@ZachWeinersmith
Well, there is that whole fairly strange fanboyism that happened and got bound up in that collection of work, republished together...starts with a B...I feel like you did an abridged version at some point?
Seriously though, I'm pretty sure it's just a new form of an old thing, but we tend not to think of people imitating chaucer as fanboys (they absolutely were). It's easier to suddenly do it and possibly make money off it than it used to be (narrow focused is algo-friendly).
SusannaH@ZachWeinersmith I think the answer is available here https://www.gregjenner.com/books/#:~:text=DEAD%20FAMOUS%3A%20AN%20UNEXPECTED%20HISTORY,our%20modern%2C%20fame%20obsessed%20society. TL;DR no, as others have already pointed out, it's not new.
Cole Brodine@ZachWeinersmith I think what makes it seem so crazy now is how accessible these people are. People have always been obsessed with celebrities, but now you can find somebody who is a little bit famous and will acknowledge you.
Richard Carlsson
FeralRobots@ZachWeinersmith Old wine in new, intoxicant-delivery-optimized casks. Oh and the wine is now also iteratively optimized for maximal addictiveness.
Basically one of those 'quantity has a quality all its own' scenarios.
Benjamin C. Kinney@ZachWeinersmith My opinion: once you realize that "bible fandom" is a thing, it becomes clear that people have spent millennia with lives and identities centered around their fandom.
That said, non-biblical fandom does seem more visible now than 10-20 years ago, possibly because the kids of well-marketed media have grown up into disposable income. (And social media widening the pool of what's visible.)
Ian Douglas Scott@BenCKinney
@ZachWeinersmith Books like Paradise Lost are just fan fiction.
Fan fiction in this sense is an ancient tradition; it's the media franchises owned by corporations are a new trend.
Juan Carlos Muรฑoz@ZachWeinersmith I'd say it's a new form of an old thing. A heated argument between, say, Marvel and DC fans is fundamentally no different from a similar argument between fans of two football teams. Both situations feature people identifying strongly with something that isn't truly connected with them in any meaningful way; football just happened to be mainstream much earlier. Mandatory Mitchell & Webb sketch about this ๐ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN1WN0YMWZU
That Mitchell and Webb Look - Football
Tiago Hackbarth@ZachWeinersmith Don Quixote de la Mancha was an obsessive fan of media. In his case, chivalry literature.
His Royal Chiggness@ZachWeinersmith I think the only move has been the target of the obsession. There have always been sports super fans and celebrity chasers, social media just makes the object of the obsession seem more reasonable/approachable
Miss Hap@ZachWeinersmith People claim it's a new thing, but when Aurther Conan Doyle killed Sherlock, fans wore mourning armbands, and hounded him into bringing the detective back to life. And don't even get me started on thr literary agent hypothesis...
MichaelPhillips@ZachWeinersmith I would look at the filk communities from before you were born. And the Star Trek fanfic people also from before your birth. They are not new. And the letters to the magazines wars that happened to between obsessive fans
@ZachWeinersmith I would argue the only actual change is that fandom itself has broadened so they're more of them than there used to be. But people arguing about the amount of water that the Italian troops need being different than the amount of water that the other troops need because the Italians travel with pasta exists even if it was never a game rule
Ben Brockert
Michelle HughesMusical genres used to be all-encompassing identities. The music you listened to meant a lot about who you were, what you cared about, how you dressed, etc.
I don't think music is like that anymore. People just listen to music, whatever. People are more genre-promiscuous.
I think the difference is how music is consumed now. The Algorithm, not the person, chooses.
All that sense of belonging had to go somewhere, so people get into other fandoms instead.
James K@ZachWeinersmith
Considering that Aristophanes's play The Frogs is based around the question of whether Euripides or Aeschylus was the better playwright, I'm going to say that this has been happening for a long time.
Considering that Aristophanes's play The Frogs is based around the question of whether Euripides or Aeschylus was the better playwright, I'm going to say that this has been happening for a long time.
cagey@ZachWeinersmith Considering that Lisztomania was such a well documented phenomenon, I think it's safe to say this has been a weird quirk of the human psyche for as long as we've had the brainpower to manifest it.
Sam Jones@ZachWeinersmith I think parasociality has gotten a push from social media specifically. Like this: you're a webcomics guy I read and have seen at a couple events. Now I can reply to a thing you said and maybe you'll see it.
There's lots of fandom without parasociality. You can be a fan of Apocalypse Now who cares if Martin Sheen was losing his mind during filming or an equally big fan who doesn't care.
The internet, I think, boosted parasociality untethered from other accomplishments.
PoorLifeChoices โ
@ZachWeinersmith The Sports fandom has been nutorious for this going back to the silent film era.