Discussing my relationship to some of my most major fandoms:
Naruto
Naruto was not my first dive into the online space but I think it’s very definitional of the mid 00s era. I remember FF.net and Photobucket Albums and shrines, AMVs, and doujinshi scanilations, and manga sites dedicated to just translating the big shonen. It is a time capsule of messy web 1.0 memories for me that I have a love hate with.
PokeAni/PokeSpe
Pokemon is just naturally packaged in with any millennial, like phone bloatware. But beyond the gen wunner nonsense exists the rare DS era of the fanbase where we weren’t fully used to rotating out girl companions and had the opportunity to go ship crazy. My mind remembers some of the most cringe fanfics, including my own. For whatever reason, this was the fandom I first started questioning gender and somehow it wasn’t because of yellow. The pokemon fandom also worked as a gateway into finding japanese fansites due to its popularity. Pokesho probably destroyed every preteen’s brain at some point.
Sonic
A real comfort fandom I keep coming back to. Where Naruto failed to overcome its toxic misogyny, Sonic’s fandom has become vibrant from embracing what it is. It is the definition of being cringe but free. I had spent my first years in DA being in a Sonic OC circle and had to go through many years being a punchline. There is also a generational issue between 2D and 3D Sonic fans where 2Ders hated the plot heavy games, hated the OC makers, and hated Amy. When Sega started pandering to them in the early 2010s, I fell out of the fandom but now we’ve moved on to dark age revival and its glorious. I nearly cried seeing Shadow with edgy angel wings. The dark ages whether anyone will admit it or not, was an inherently queer era of the fandom and it will never not be a joy to see the love for how current fandom keeps going forward. Each cunty OC, each hardcore emo piece, each yurified ship, each semicrackship, each post that gets that Rouge having tits is not just a matter of objectifying women heals me a little inside. I come back to this fandom for fun and I keep waiting eagerly for the proper reviewing of Sonic 06’s potential.
Vocaloid
I can’t describe it as anything more than the definition of teenage girlhood. Probably since the most major face is a teen girl herself. For me, Gumi had always been my favourite as she had been the number 2 at the time. Vocaloid in it’s first renaissance was an early output for a struggling generation. Millennials were not alright and were just starting for mental health advocacy to be destigmatized. The songs I listened to were made by people coping who then helped me cope in return. Miku as a character is more or less the physical representation of adolescents connecting their feelings to each other across borders and time. It’s why as a transmasc NB, I still think of my teenhood through the lens of being a girl (lovingly). Like Sonic, Vocaloid is something fun and indulgent but it also was very purpose finding.
Soul Eater
My forever fandom. The gaps between succeeding fandoms become so much bigger after this because of how I keep coming back to it and reinterpreting the media. I’ve had at least 5 eras with it and it was actually a little questionable how much merch I had of it at my recent con. No matter how much we try, I don’t think Eastern and Western fan culture will act the same…at least not for a few more generations. And when I want to participate in this fandom, I want to do it in an Eastern way. Sometimes Kii Kanna’s doujin works define my more of my fandom than the source itself but at the same time, it was foundational for encouraging me to experiment with how I draw. It can be hard to have the western side associate it so much with emo aesthetics because you don’t end up with a diverse set of merch. That combined with the lack of official merch makes me envious of a lot of other shonen fandom that get the full experience; the cute variety of art from fujos, dakimakuras, seven million plushes, plenty of badge options for ita bags, birthday events, cup sleeve events, etc. But the Eastern fandom and I mentally synced at some point because the idea of Soul Eater yuri infected them at the same point it hit my head. Every day I hope to bridge the gap between me and my JP/KR moots.
Homestuck
My extremely personal relationship with Homestuck stems more from the experience and community it gave me. Homestuck was a cultural change and most people do not realize how much it had done. It was practically a genre creator and often I have to tell friends that their current favorite piece of media is from Homestuck lineage; Deltarune, Ava’s Demon, The Locked Tomb. Homestuck helped me process a lot of trauma and an emerging personality disorder. It was how human the characters were, it was how loved my community made me feel. It was the feeling of my world expanding and the world progressing. It gave me terms to describe ill defined feelings. In the last few years, I’ve had to place it aside as it can’t be separated from the people I had known during that time, to whom I still love but cannot continue being with. It still sticks with me deeply and it makes me wish works like Psyclonials had gotten better attention. Please read that if you’re reading this, it felt like it whispered the meaning of life to me it was so cosmically changing.
Steven Universe
Steven Universe was not really a fandom for me as much as it was a cultural event. A long ongoing cultural event. We would not have the representation we have today if it were not for it and it’s had the unfortunate disservice as being remembered as a flavor of tenderqueer. Sadly for me, it came along at a point were I did not want to just be compared to the skinny characters after freshly surviving being underweight due to illness and it meant that I didn’t get to explore as much how beyond body type similar I was to Pearl and Lapis.
Zootopia
So I did start typing this up because of this but not just because it’s my current primary fandom. It was the realization that of all the fandoms I had been in, I do not think any other has had as many fanworks that emotionally destroy me as Zootopia does and I was in the HOMESTUCK fandom. I saw another video of Judy is Dead and started crying and had to question if it was just because I was in it or if it really just created such good bangers. Maybe what stands out the most beyond my other fandoms is how all the characters are adults and therefore the tone most stories take tackle more mature adult themes. Like as in topics that hit more for someone with a fully developed lobe. Judy is Dead does so much damage because it’s about middle aged grief. The abortion comic despite the giant joke its become, ultimately was dealing with a very real conversation adults their age may have to go through. Even leaning into the territory of smut, it often leans more into an adult manner of dealing with sexual tension (which is no bullshitting more often than not). I’ve said it a few times lately but it feels like a fandom I had lost out of for how seen I was in it. It had charmed me a lot, even after summer of 17, how often I had gotten messages invested in something I had created but I had been too caught up in my idea of a professional art school image to delve in properly. Walking in between the abandoned homes of Z1’s fandom and the newly built parts of Z2’s fandom has such an odd sensation to it. It’s similar to what Sand Planet invoked in the Vocaloid fandom. Want to also give it props for being one of the few fandoms to have a respectable relationship with the creators. They see us, they know what we’re about, and we don’t get parasocial on social media about it like some other western media fandoms will. There’s something to be said for that.
Miraculous
A fandom should not give you psychosis but this one almost certainly did in 2019. I had blips in and out each season but I couldn’t return after season 3 simply because it’s so deeply tied to a season of non stop panic attacks. Really enjoyed the hurt/comfort side of it and had this one favorite fanfic author but outside of that I can’t remember too much in actual emotional ties to the fandom and that might just be repression if I’m real. Season 3 brought out so much potential but by the end of it you really felt jerked around. I think it was a fun ride to be on and the smut was A tier but it lost a lot of flavor when storylines didn’t progress in canon.
DanDaDan
Another hyperfixation fandom. I tried to be careful because I could tell I was gonna fall off hard. What I want to not is Ao3 had THIRTY THREE fanfics for the whole fandom when I first got into it. Idk what it is now.
