The Cycle of Fandom
I am an early Millennial. As a 1982 baby, I literally came of age in the year 2000. A lot of hay has been made about how my generation does things differently from our parents. And by now, plenty of it has been made about why, as well. I won’t rehash the talking points, but it comes down to how much things changed in our formative years. Our parents went from vinyl to 8-tracks. We went from cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 players to streaming over our phones. That’s a lot to have to adapt to and as a result adapting is just what we do.
But when it comes to fandom, the human condition really hasn’t changed that much. People like things and when they like things they obsess, collect, analyze, and sadly they eventually eventually gate-keep.
Now, let me preface all of this by saying that I don’t really have any citations for any of this. But, as someone who was thoroughly raised in fandom, I also have a tendency to get hooked on things a lot of my generation would scoff at for being old. I love the original Lost in Space and Man from UNCLE, the very first Mobile Suit Gundam is my favorite, I’m fascinated by the puppetry in Thunderbirds, and I’m a complete sucker for just about anything with Cary Grant. I will binge-watch classic Doctor Who as much as I will the new stuff and love every moment of each for what it is.
For most Millennials, this isn’t the case, for whatever reason. It’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It just is. Most folks in my generation have heavy nostalgia for the 80s at the oldest and just don’t really concern themselves with very much from before that. It’s not that they don’t have an appreciation, but they don’t have the resulting fangirl crush I have on David McCallum that I will commiserate with my mother about (Illya Kuryakin is an adorable badass and I will die on that hill).
I like to think that this has given me a bit of a unique view on fandom, in general. I participate in some older fandoms, where things move a bit more slowly and where the average age is usually at least one generation removed from me and therefore a bit wiser in a lot of ways. They’ve just sort of... already covered this ground, so to speak.
The difference is the pace at which they did it. But the cycle is the same.
It’s never anything that starts maliciously. No fan I know of has ever set out to point-blank keep someone else from liking the thing. Rather it starts with a sense of seniority. “You like this thing, now, too? Great! I was there for the beginning and let me tell you, back then...” It’s always like a fandom big sibling who wants to show their younger counterpart the ropes; get them proper caught-up and versed in the lore so that they can better participate.
I love fandom when it’s at this stage and it’s the type of fan I strive to be at all times. I don’t like setting conditions for fandom. I think it’s partly because I am such a late-comer to so many. The idea of being a fan of something that was made 30 years or more before you were born is a hell of a thing, but I’ve never let that stop me. And for the most part, these fandoms that are much older than I am have reached the point where they are welcoming and just sort of stuck in the big sibling stage. Sure, you have the occasional troll, the guy that scoffs that I can’t understand because I wasn’t there at the very beginning. But they’re usually slapped to the ground pretty quickly by everyone else.
There is the occasional exception, of course. But one of the things those such fandoms have in common is that there is still new content being made for it. Doctor Who is a prime example, as is Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings (yes, I do count the upcoming Amazon series and other non-book content as new content, deal with it). There’s something about new content being made for a fandom that causes an odd anxiety that thing that the fandom loves is going to be somehow ruined.
I’m going to use Doctor Who as an example for a lot of this. The show turned 56 years old this last November. 56 years! And the fact that it had a couple of decade-long breaks in there, which were themselves only separated by a single two-hour movie, only serve to highlight the changes it went through.
My second-oldest memory is of Doctor Who. I remember the regeneration from Tom Baker to Peter Davison. Now, Whovian historians, before you freak out because that change-over happened in 1981, before I was even born, remember that back then the US got episodes around two and three years later than the BBC, in syndication on public television channels. So for me, that change happened when I was two. I remember there being some Big Thing (tm) that my dad was anticipating. I remember the burgundy and red outfit that Tom Baker was wearing while laying stricken on the ground, surrounded by his companions. And I remember him suddenly turning into a blond and sitting up, wide-eyed and mystified. I didn’t understand any of it at the time, of course. And so I also remember turning to my dad, who was watching with excitement, while the credits were rolling and asking why the man turned into another man. Oddly, that’s where the memory ends. I don’t remember the response. In fact, it’s only having since seen that episode as an adult that I have been able to identify it for what it was.
After that, I don’t have much in the way of Doctor Who related memories until the Paul McGann movie in 1996. I was 14 and not well-steeped in Whovian lore at the time and I thought it was great. My dad was more luke-warm to it because it just wasn’t the same as what he grew up with. It was a sentiment shared by many, unfortunately, which meant that Paul McGann’s wonderful take on the Doctor was relegated purely to audio adventures until the 50th anniversary in 2013. Sadly, in the early days of the internet, those of us who liked it weren’t quite able to find each other yet. In the days of Usenet and mailing lists, it was still only the most hardcore fans of a thing who got together to geek out. Meaning that most of the conversation was “oh, that’s all wrong.” Lurking in those conversations, I saw pretty much every tremulous young person who dared to say that they liked it get slapped to the ground and told they weren’t a fan of “the real thing.”
Gate-keeping. It’s nothing new. And in 1996 Doctor Who fandom ran smack into its pad-locked closed barrier. Around that same time other old but still active fandoms were starting to manifest the same thing on the internet. It was when Trekkies suddenly separated into Trekkies (who had seen the original as it aired) and Trekkers (who came long later), for reasons I have never understood.
No, that’s not true. I understand it. Us humans tend to get possessive about our stories. We have a sort of emotional ownership to them, even if not a legal one. And when you feel an ownership of something, there is an instinct to protect it, keep it pure. And to do that, it’s natural to try to set oneself up as an authority on the subject.
It took another decade for Doctor Who to come off the shelf again, in 2005. I was 24 by then, the age that marketers tend to target. A friend got his hands on a digi-copy of Christopher Eccleston’s first episode, “Rose,” that had been leaked to the internet in its entirety about a week before it actually aired. We watched it before our D&D group met and I was instantly hooked. And the friend that was responsible for the new addiction was only too happy to have new fandom friends.
The pendulum had swung. Gate-keeping was out and welcoming people to the fandom was the MO. Of course, there were and still are to this day old school Whovians who deny that anything past Sylvester McCoy exists, calling the 1996 movie and the current series a different show entirely. There will always be those people. But for the most part, Whovians welcomed new fans with open arms throughout all of Eccleston’s and David Tennant’s runs.
Now, that one cycle, from welcoming to gate-keeping, and back to welcoming, took 42 years. Most things don’t last anywhere close to that long. A show might be on for five years or a movie and its sequels be around for ten and after that, for the most part, it’s done. And in the pre-internet age of fandom, the pendulum swung slowly enough never to hit a repeat in the cycle.
The internet has sped up everything about fandom. The airing of just about any show in any country might as well be a world-wide premiere these days because it all just travels that quickly. It has to if it wants to maintain any sort of surprise in its story lines, otherwise internet chatter will spoil it. These days, things move so fast that even the few hours between an episode of Doctor Who airing in the UK and in the US is enough that one can be subjected to spoilers. And the swing of the fandom pendulum has sped up accordingly.
For Doctor Who, it started swinging back again when David Tennant left the show and Matt Smith took over. Tennant’s Doctor had a lot of fans who desperately didn’t want “their Doctor” to leave, many of whom took to the internet, swearing off the show. They said it would never be as good because David Tennant was just the best Doctor ever. By then, there were a number of us Millennial Whovians who had dug into the lore and were comfortable with the concept of regeneration as a part of it. After all, it had already happened nine times. And there was a bit of a tendency to call those people who swore off Matt Smith’s episodes as being fans not of Doctor Who but of David Tennant. Meanwhile, of course, old school Whovians were patting us all on the head going “aren’t you cute. Now you understand why Tom Baker leaving was such a thing.”
And so, the pendulum started to swing back. You started having people call other people “not really fans of Doctor Who.” That only got worse when Peter Capaldi took over and there was a significant portion of the fandom upset that the Doctor was now an older guy instead of the 30-something Doctors we had grown accustomed to.
Gate-keeping reared its ugly head for most of Capaldi’s run and, sadly, I think that kept a lot of people from the fandom and from really appreciating the 12th Doctor. That cycle has started to swing back with Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, but the gate-keeping is in a stage where it is desperate to hold on to what Doctor Who was when they became fans and therefore is very toxic right now. It’s not pretty. But those asshats are starting to be slapped to the ground on social media thanks to a new influx of fans who are now once again more comfortable with the idea of regeneration and its possibilities.
Similar swings are happening with many other fandoms. The Star Wars fandom is a really ugly place right now, quite frankly. Star Trek seems to be on the welcoming end. There are always the exceptions to every generalization, of course. There will always be “that guy” in fandom.
This swing has always existed. Millennials are just the first generation for whom it has swung multiple times in the life of the show. The internet is probably the biggest contributing factor to that. What that means is that we’re the first generation to really have the chance to see the pattern for what it is. A few of us have even been able to extrapolate back and understand that, no, this is how it always has been, just slower.
The hopeful part of that is this; by virtue of being the first to recognize the pattern, we are the first ones with the opportunity to learn from that history. And now we’re starting to see fandoms that actively abhor gate-keeping and just want more people to come in and play. But those tend to be very young fandoms.
The one that comes to mind for me is Critical Role. This is a fandom that was wholly born on the internet, as the series is streamed live on Twitch. It’s really unlike anything that has ever had a fandom this size before. It’s only been around for four years or so. But the cast is on its second D&D campaign which means it’s already had the opportunity to have the elitism gate that could be closed. But something different seems to have happened. The very moment that people started saying “I’m a real fan because I watched the Vox Machina campaign, not just the Mighty Nein,” they were told to shut the hell up and let people like things. A foot was stuck into the gate and wrenched it back open before it could close. And you know what? The fandom has absolutely exploded in the last two years. And I have yet to run into a single instance of someone gate-keeping for it that didn’t get an overwhelming and harsh rebuttal from the folks who welcome people to the fandom.
Sadly, the Critical Role fandom is distinct from the Dungeons & Dragons fandom on this point. But therein lies the difference. D&D is over 45 years old, ten times and more the age of Critical Role. And the “satanic panic” over it in the 80s made a lot of D&D players very protective of the hobby, only amplifying that. The age of your average Critter is only mid-to-late 20s or so. At 37, I’m a little bit of an outlier, I have found. The Critter fandom is big on TikTok which I... don’t grock, frankly, because I’m turning into an old fart. But I’ve never, ever, been made to feel unwelcome because of that difference. It’s been a refreshing experience, frankly.
In contrast, I really feel like I’m only now starting to be considered a “true Whovian” by the old school Whovians. It took me 15 years and required me getting hooked on the classic stuff (which I was all too happy to do). People who have never seen any of the classic stuff and don’t care to are often still looked down upon. That needs to change.
The Critical Role fandom is still young and all of this may prove to be overly-optimistic in the end. But I think it has the opportunity to be the first big fandom not to go through the gate-keeping cycle. I sincerely hope we can hold on to that. The cast and crew are a big part of that, with how they always hammer on the idea of inclusivity and engage so directly with the fandom. “Don’t forget to love each other” is Matt Mercer’s sign-off at the end of every episode and serves as a constant reminder. And if more casts and crews of more fandoms do that sort of engaging in the future, it will help break the cycle of fandom gate-keeping all the more thoroughly. This is a fact that production companies are starting to awaken to as Millennials, comfortable with social media, age into positions of authority.
So, welcome people in, gate-keep, almost cause the whole thing to collapse, repeat. That’s the cycle that fandom has engaged in for three generations and more. But I think we’re on the cusp of breaking that cycle, for the most part. The idea that you can be a fan of something without knowing absolutely everything about it has been gaining very visible traction in the last five years or so and it is wonderful to see.
Now, please, people. Don’t prove me wrong.
