seen from South Korea
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from Italy
seen from Venezuela
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Ukraine
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Yemen
seen from France
seen from Canada
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from United States
how old were you when you started participating in online fandom
10 or younger
11-13
14-16
17-20
21-24
25-27
28-32
33-37
38-41
42-49
50-60
61 or older
don't question why i put the ages this way it just is totally grouped by how i view ages
you should reblog if you wanna see more people answer!
Hi there, This might be a stupid question, so I apologize in advance, you can ignore it.
I noticed that many old ladies are fans of Louis, which is very lovely and respectable.
Me as a young girl personally liked 1d era louis, I still adore him, but he is no longer my number 1 like 1d era. And I don't get it, I'm like how, why, what is the reason that old ladies interest in Louis
I guess that's me? I mean on the one hand like.... I'm just a normal ass adult age I think, I have a ways to go to be a proper old lady/ old whatever gender I am. But otoh there's nothing wrong with being an old lady so no point in caring about that and besides from what everyone says, the answer won't change in 10 or 20 or 30 more years. Anyway... it's not a stupid question! But I already know you won't believe me when I tell you, IT'S JUST NOT DIFFERENT. No one does until later. Everyone says it but when you're young you're like hmm but no... probably fake. True for them maybe but not for me, when I get to be like 30 I will be *DIFFERENT* and MATURE and put aside childish things and read Serious Books and go to see opera only! (spoiler: you won't. You will feel exactly the same only somewhat more assertive and less confused, but your general tastes and what you find entertaining will not have changed.) So yeah, literally the answer is, for whatever reason you are a fan, same reasons probably? It's true that I don't have quite the breathless confusing overwhelm around my fan feelings as I did about things when I was a preteen, but mostly, just being a fan of music and the people who make it, being enthralled by someone's presence and, in this case, their mind and gender and persona and appreciating a pretty face and nice ass, it's no different over time. I do not want to fuck him IRL and maybe that's different than you? But honestly that's much less about age (and honestly he's a man in his 30s is that even an issue) than my own complicated gender and sexuality issues and also maybe just not personally mostly actually wanting to fuck people I've never met even if it's fun to appreciate them aesthetically. The feeling of kind of wanting to crawl inside and BECOME the object of fan focus in some way I'm pretty sure is consistent from when I was a kid right up until the present though
Its a bit ironic that larries get so mad at the rest of harry's fans for 'sexualizing' him or whatever because they might be attracted to him but honestly most fans (old or young) aren't weirdly living in the past, they are blogging or writing about an adult. Larries are the only ones I've seen who still consistently and regularly rb and tag gifs of under-18s with weird shit etc. It's been 10 years, why still so obsessed with their teenage selves??
Yep, you’re not wrong.
I mean there’s literally no reason to make a distinction between the way heterosexual fans sexualise him, and queer fans sexualise him. Both groups do. If anything, what's unsettling is that at least with the ‘het Harries’ back in the band days, a lot of them were actually around the age of the boys themselves and having an attraction to a boy their age, where as quite a lot of the bigger larries back then were already 30+ and sexualising him.
Obviously both groups would have people of an older age sexualising him between 16-21, but it’s quite bizarre to me that there’s apparently something more wrong with a 19 year old girl thinking Harry is hot and blogging about it, than there is a 25-30+ year old woman thinking 16-21 year old Harry is gay and writing smut for the masses.
It goes back again to the point about ‘larrie’ culture positioning itself as superior by pretending that young women having an attraction to the band is immoral and wrong and pitiful, but queer women having an obsession with a boy/young man’s sexuality is superior, righteous, intelligent. It really is just a bunch of people demonising young women for having feelings of sexuality towards a man.
They are obsessed with their teen selves and the band days because there’s zero content from any other time period. Even with the band days most cute ‘larry’ moments were from earlier on, so they sexualise 17 year old Harry ten years after the event even took place. I think it would be a sign to most rational people that if you need to keep looking back at things that happened 6-10 years ago to reassure yourself that two people are in love now, you probably don’t have enough reason to believe they are still in love now.
I don't know how accurate this is, but I've read on TV Tropes that the general consensus on Super Sentai in Japan is that if you're watching it and are over the age of seven there's probably something wrong with you, which is pretty depressing.
Well, there is something wrong with me but it has nothing to do with my love of Super Sentai.
Just kidding (mostly) but thank you for the insight! Even here, I get the “You’re too old for that!” And (from my own Mother) “When are you going to outgrow that stuff?” Yeah, I may be older than 90% of the people on tumblr but you should never have to give up the things you love and find enjoyment in just because you are no longer (or never were) part of the target audience.
Age and Experience in Fandom*
*English-reading online transformative fandom often using AO3 and tumblr and willing to complete surveys :)
This month’s @threepatchpodcast episode, When I’m 64, looks at fandom and aging. To go along with these discussions, here are some demographic stats from a few fandom surveys on the age distribution in our online fandom communities.
CAVEAT: These surveys are not random samples of the transformative fandom population. All numbers come from voluntary online surveys distributed on social media and fandom media, and the limits of opportunity and inclination introduced biases (more on that for the F&S survey here). Still, it’s the best data we have, so here is what @fffinnagain is willing to infer.
From these survey results we can draw a few main points:
Fans’ ages range from preteens to late sixties and beyond
Many (possibly most) are in their 20′s and 30′s
Most of us started engaging in things we fan over by the age of 19
But new fans can be of any age
For adult fans, there is a fairly even chance they’ve been in fandom for less than 3 years (~5-10% by our counts)
The usual plots and explanations below.
How old are these fans?
Whatever our expectations, responses to fandom surveys show that these fanfiction readers seem to be mostly in their twenties and thirties, but there is no apparent upper bound on age in these communities.
From the 2013 AO3 census (11k participants), the average age was 25, with a median of 22-24, and a mode age of 21. 4% were under the age of 16 and 19% of participants in the the AO3 census reported being 30+.
However, the distribution of age depends a lot on community. Our small TPP listener survey in 2015 (230 participants) showed an older demographic: 55% of participants were 30 and above, with a strong mode between 28 and 32. Also, approximately 12% were over the age of 50.
TPP’s fandom and sexuality survey (2195 participants) limited its participant pool to fans 18 and over, but the trends fall somewhere between these two. Average age of 28, mode of 25, and 40% over 30. The distribution of those responses is plotted above.
While none of these surveys capture these online fandom communities cleanly, the consistency of the pattern strengthens their claim: the largest age bracket are people in their 20′s, with substantial presence of teens and people in their 30′s. In all three surveys, more than 50% were between 20 and 40. Fans above the age of 40 are not as common, making up somewhere between 5% and 35% of the active population, depending on the community.
How long have these fans been in fandom?
The fandom and sexuality survey included questions about fans’ first experiences, including the age they started engaging with fandom stuff.
By 19, 70.9% of the F&S survey participants had begun their first forays into fandom life! These early experiences may not have been within the same communities they currently inhabit, but the enthusiasm for transformative works starts young, and opportunity may be an important factor in who gets involved when.
From this we can run a quick calculation: how long has it’s been since their first fandom experiences? Across these 2195 fans, the median time since first fandom was 11 years, mode of 15. We can’t assume that all participants have been consuming fanworks continuously since first contact, however these responses make it obvious that interest in fanfiction, fan art, etc., is not restricted to the eight years of teenage-hood.
There is a long tail in this graph, with small but tangible numbers of people coming into this part of fandom in the 40′s and 50′s. Are older fans more or less likely to be recent inductees?
To look at this from a different angle, we broke the participants into age brackets. This figure reports the percentage of each age bracket with X number of years since their first fandom.
The most important spot here is the first clump of columns: fans that have been involved in fandom less than 3 years. These are the newbies. Quite strikingly, they are pretty even across these groups: ~5-10% survey participants in each bracket were relatively new to fandom!
If I (@fffinnagain) were to hazard a guess, the ratio of active fans with less than 3 years experience is probably higher than 1 in 10. The F & S survey was long and serious and I can imagine a larger portion of newer fans would have felt unsure of whether their experience was relevant. Not everyone steps on to a scene and owns it within 12 months! However, I wouldn’t assume this factor would interact significantly with age, so it still seems fair to extrapolate that within these age bracket, the proportion of new fans is still consistent. Teenagers, however, would be a different story and this data sadly cannot speak to their experiences.
All this suggests that when we meet adult fans, be they in their 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, or older, there is a pretty even chance that they are still getting acclimatized to this culture. So be kind, and don’t assume one way or the other.
Something I’ve been struggling with is other Larries reblogging those criticising women over 30 for having a blog is misogyny memes. They use that to not deal with the thing about them sexualising kids like they think feigning sexism excuses them from being inappropriate. As a victim of pedophilia I don’t trust that at all.
Hey love, first of all I hope you’re ok.
I really agree.
Women of all ages are allowed to have interests. However, there is no context in which adults are excused from reflecting on and policing their own behaviour when around younger people or interacting with content that is centred on younger people.
An analogy is that people of all ages are allowed at public pools, but adults do have to think about the language they use or the way they interact with younger people in an all ages space. It’s basic human decency.
This fandom does, completely uncritically, normalise 30+ (and often much older) people writing smut about people who were between 16-21 at the time of publication. This fandom does uncritically normalise people 30+ making sexually charged fan art about a boy who was between 16-21 at the time of publication. This fandom STILL normalises people 30+ reblogging gifs of a 17 year old and hyper sexualising them.
If it were a fandom of men behaving this way, people would be livid. Because it’s clearly gross and predatory. But in THIS fandom, people protect themselves and each other with ‘wow that’s misogyny to police me, a woman, in the space’. Again, it’s people using their identity to escape any accountability for bad behaviour.
People also uncritically normalise a space where 40+ year olds are running blogs that recommend smut to teenagers. Where 40+ year olds are positioning themselves as queer elders to teens they don’t know, and normalising non queer values like invasiveness. People normalise a space where a 17 year old could end up in a group chat with a 50 year old and no one checks their age or requests a zoom to be sure.
There’s no accountability. No one in this space EVER speaks out about 30+ year olds sexualising content featuring a 17 year old. No one ever questions whether those older women behave appropriately and show an awareness of their age in the space, a space they share with literal kids. And no one ever wonders if these blogs who were making this ‘art’, ie written or visual smut of a teen, during the band days when the creator was 30+ or even 40-50+ at the time, should be considered untrustworthy. Because I have to say, as someone nearing 30 now, I can’t fathom writing fic about 17-21 year old Harry, especially 16-19, because it’s gross. I’m old enough to be teaching kids that age and having a duty of care over them.
If these women were men, there would be outrage at some of their behaviour. But because they hide behind ‘feminism’, people allow them to be creepy, and have done for ten years.
Isn’t it incredibly ironic that people were supporting Rebecca calling out the sexualisatsion of 17 year olds unsure of their sexuality...when the same people have sexualised Harry as a gay smut figure since he was 16?
