Discussion Post: Making A Fan

[amalnahurriyeh]

This is a continuation of the previous discussion post...

So let's say your campaign has worked; now your friend is superexcited, can recite the entire lite cream cheese speech, has favorite episodes, has put the 2AM reruns on Syfy (or local equivalent) on hir TiVo (or local equivalent). And now you want to try for the big leagues...you want to bring hir into fandom. Like, full-on membership: belonging to CAPSLOCK communities, obsessively collecting icons for every mood, joining multifandom RPGs, ship-manifesto-writing, fic-writing, vid-making, squeeful-excess fandom.

Where do you start? With particularly artistically perfect fanworks? A soft intro with an LJ and a membership in some nonthreatening comms (like xfiles or a rewatch comm)? A whole bunch of crackfic or crackvids to burn the mind into submission?

Highbrow or lowbrow? Softball or hardball? How do you make a fangirl (or boy, or none-of-the-above)?

(PSST DON'T FORGET: SQUEEFEST ON WEDNESDAY!)

Comments

[littlegreen42]

I think it really depends on the person. For me, it was great to just jump in and spend hours reading all the fan fic I could get my hands on, no matter what genre, no matter whether it was good or bad!fic or something in between. It was just an exhilarating experience. But for someone else, this might be a little off-putting. It might be better to just ease some people into fandom.

Also, you have to take into account the different kinds of fans. For example, I'm not really what you would call a shippy person. If someone had tried to get me into fandom by showing me MSR vids, or giving me only MSR stories to read, or had a shippiest episodes marathon I might've thought, "No, this really isn't for me." Not that I don't like any of these things, they're just hardly what I find most enjoyable about fandom. Now if I were trying to get someone interested in fandom, I might take a decidedly non-shippy approach, and if this person were more inclined toward shipping, my attempts might not work.

Being a fan is such a personal thing, and everyone's different, so I don't know if there's one way to do it. Or if you even should do it -- my introduction to fandom was just so spontaneous that it might not have been as fun had someone been guiding me along.