Fandom and Social Media
Because it's week 9 and if you don't realize our main topic is social media, then I'm glad I told you lmao, anyways. Let me just get this joke out of the way first:
Ok, now that the fan joke is out of the way, let's get back to the actual topic.
What is fandom?
A fandom is a subculture of people that consists of fans. The word fandom itself originated back from an 1896 Washington Post sports column describing "local fandom."
The word fandom can be separated into two parts, "fan" and the suffix "-dom". "Fan" originated from the word "fanatic", which was used as an adjective for "frenzied" or "mad", while the suffix for "-dom" two things, a rank or the rank of a person who controls that place (a kingdom who is controlled by the king, hence the "-dom") at the back, or wisdom, which is a state of being wise.
I'd like to think that the "-dom" in fandom takes a little bit of inspiration from both sides of the meaning. On one side, it could mean a region controlled by fans, which to be honest, that's what most creators/artists end up doing to appeal to more fans; and on the other side, it could mean the fan's wisdom on that particular topic. Ever think that you know more about Justin Bieber than himself? Well, there you go.
The fun stuff
Now that we've got the English out of the way, we can move on to what is inside a fandom. I hope you're ready, cause where we're going, we aren't coming back.
Canon
This is the 'boring stuff', or lore and characters that are written by the author themselves. This is the information given out by the creator and anything that is not written in the creators own personal bible or baptized by them is considered sacrilegious.
For example, if I said that Harry Potter grew up in the France and ate baguette's for breakfast everyday, and chilling under the Eiffel Tower on his free time, picking up chicks called Emma Watson, I'd probably be burnt at the cross by hardcore fans. It's not Canon.
Anything that J.K. Rowling writes and acknowledges to be canon, is canon.
Harry had erectile dysfunction.
Headcanon
Headcanon is when fans basically choose to believe in what they want to, based on previous interactions between characters, or established lore, even if it goes against canon.
For example, Hermione should have ended up with Harry, and that is my personal headcanon.
Shipping
So, this.. this can be either canon or non-canon, sometimes they go from non-canon to canon, sometimes they are never meant to be but the tension between their characters is so strong you just wanna see them fu-
I digress.
Shipping is when you pair up two characters that you really like, imagining and hoping that they'd be a couple. When when you ship someone, you become a shipper and you get to choose a ship name. An example for me would be when I shipped two of the best characters that had some insane chemistry together but the author just WOULD NOT make it canon and ACTUALLY TRIED TO ANGER THE FANS BY SHIPPING THEM WITH ANOTHER PAIR AND THEY END UP GOING BACK TO THEM ANYWAYS JUST BECAUSE FANS KEP-
I digress.
Harry and Hermione's ship name is Harmony and I love it.
Fanfiction
Fanfiction is when fans take writing into their own hands and start writing about the story based on the characters and lore established as canon, creating a Fanon of sorts. Based on personal experience, this usually happens when fans wants to put themselves in their favourite character's perspective and live their lives because of idk, jealously. Or when fans decide that the story that the creator is writing or the ending that the story is going towards is unsatisfactory. Or or, when fans decide that they want Harry to have private lessons with Snape after school to study each other's wands.
Fanfiction can be anything, literally.
There are fanfictions of literally anything from games to even the real world history. I'm 100% sure that there is fanfiction of Leonardo da Vinci meeting up with a time-travelling dog that adopted a child. Oh wai-
Works of fanfiction aren't illegal as well, since they are considered "transformative" work based on the original source material.
Fanworks
Fanworks are stuff that fans make to pay homage to the canon. Stuff is very loosely defined here, it could be artwork, it could be a piece of music or even an entire alternate universe where they rewrite the entire story based on their liking. While talking about this topic, I would like to bring up Undertale and their amazing fandom, with a game built around making choices and decisions, with such colourful and interactive characters and makes every playthrough different, the alternate universes that have spawned from Undertale is, amazing.
The music and fanart made out of the game also tests the boundary of the fan's imagination. Below is a artwork of a character (Sans) from the game itself, compared to a random fanart you can find with a simple google search.
Props goes to Hakki who drew the artwork.
Social Media
How does this all tie back to Social Media?
Well, everything. A fandom would not be a collective group of people if they can't collect themselves and unite. Social Media has allowed creators to reach out with their personal fandom to get feedback and recognition to motivate them or seeing their reaction. Have you ever made something and other people reacted either positively and negatively?
That feeling is amazing.
Seeing other people invested in something you created is what keeps creators going, and social media allows that. People often think of social media as a very specific thing, like Facebook, Instagram, or even Tumblr, but social media is a very loose term used to describe websites that focuses on communication, content-sharing, and collaborations, and that basically describes all the websites that are user interactive.
Fans will always exist, but fans will have trouble uniting to be a fandom, without the help of social media.
Thank you for coming to my DUCK-talk, I'll be here next week with gaming, and yes, I am very excited.
