Adult Fandom: C/D

Is the idea of fandom over the age of about 13 inherently embarrassing to you? Or are you a major fan of something? Do you have a tumblr dedicated to gifs of ron swanson?

Yes, it is embarrassing.

Im a fan of the photography of Steven Brooks

http://steven-brooks.tumblr.com/

in general i think it's pretty inexplicable and often silly but live and let live etc

(xp) Yes but are you a Steven Brooks fan? There's a difference in the way the word feels used that way.

The question asked something, not someone?

Observing the subculture of a fandom can be an inexpensive pleasure. Although there are times when this is not much removed from going to an asylum to gawk at the inmates.

major fan of adults

(xp) I mean more that the "I'm a fan of" construction seems much more casual than actual Fandom. You can say you're a fan of just about anything you like.

maybe I should have capitalised the 'F' in fan.

Figured this thread would be about whether we preferred x-art to brazzers.

Fandom itt seems to mean literally fanatical about something trivial e.g. supporting a football club you don't live near or whatever.

x-art surely, some stunning stuff in their back cat, who doesn't like tiffany thompson

I'm not… but good luck to the fandoms? Feels like they're bound up with creating good social spaces on the internet, ways to find or structure identity, channel creativity, argue in interesting ways etc… like there's a level on which idgi & of course there's a lot that's ridiculous, but seems to me probably more good than bad there re: human happiness.

fp'd nashwan for suggesting football was trivial

Being a fan of someones work can give you ideas about how to be better yourself. Not necessarily to copy, exactly but to learn how others do things

i think im mainly thinking of tumblr fuckboys here

woof otm. It seems to be more about finding common interests with other people, and potentially an outlet for creativity, than anything else.

If you can create a supportive community of friends around Supernatural fanfic, more power to you.

I think I look down on fans because of the willingly subservient aspect. If I had fans, I would be glad of the attention but at the same time think they were a bit pathetic. So I don't really understand how you can give so much attention to someone who probably finds you pathetic. Likewise, I think unrequited love - which I was a big fan of in my teens - is uncool in adults.

I admit I probably just don't get it though and it is no doubt about bonding with fellow fans as much as anything else.

It took me a while to get tumblr but I now think of it as a really good place for photography, has mostly replaced Flickr for me!

What would ILX do if it didn't wake up every morning thinking "To whom can I feel superior today?"

make a pass-agg post about it?

nah but srsly, just cos a topic allows for people to get superior doesn't mean it isn't worth thinking about

I like to engage with people in various fandoms (electronic music, Star Trek, superhero comics, Avatar the Last Airbender [the cartoon], etc), because you can often have deeper and more meaningful conversations with them about these specific cultural objects than you can with folks that only have a casual knowledge of them... But I'm not sure if I'm devoted enough a fan to actually belong to any "fandom". Where do you draw the line on that? Attending a fan convention? Joining a message board devoted to a specific person/cultural object? Sending fan letters? Cosplay? I haven't really done any of that.

Yeah I can think you can clearly delineate between liking someone's work or following their career and idk tumbles dedicated to them or slash or talking of them by first name to confused strangers

Also, is there something that separates the sort music geeks ILM is full of who like to analyze the minute details of this or that pop tune from "fandom"?

(xpost)

nb I would gladly do any of the above re Luka modric had I the time

liking someone's work or following their career and idk tumbles dedicated to them or slash or talking of them by first name to confused strangers

This sounds like a huge exaggeration, though. Most fandoms I've come across (on internet sites devoted to a specific subjects, for example) are far less obsessional, and the majority of people there are perfectly capable of having a critical approach to the object of their fandom.

Yeah there's stages in between

I mean I don't rly have to imagine too hard my scoffing at those behaviours before being stumped if someone were to point out the way I react to the fortunes of a football club several hundred miles away

yeah i wanna draw a distinction between caring about football and caring about cartoon robots punching each other and then i realize i'm in no position to mock

When I think about the number of television and radio airtime minutes -- and entire stations and networks -- devoted to discussing sports, and the amount of column inches in every daily newspaper devoted to sports, and the fact that the highest paid public employees in nearly every state are college sports coaches, and the tailgating and the body painting and the custom jerseys and all the other paraphernalia, I get really, really suspicious of people denigrating "adult fandom" when they are a) probably sports fans and b) almost certainly containing their denigration exclusively to comics or sci-fi or TV shows or what have you.

ron swanson would really hate all those ron swanson tumblrs...really makes you think

Sports fans are into the shirt, right? I heard that a lot when I spent a week in Liverpool a couple of years ago

I was staying at a friends house when they were playing I think the spurs and although he was a fan, a lot of the players he said weren't fit to wear the shirt

A lot of the time it's not just the shirt itself- they'll have the name and number of their favourite player on the back so they're actually dressed up as that person.

i.e. sports cosplay

even within football obsessives there's a lot of variation - i'm not a big fan of the shirt/name combo, like shirts as design/fashion objects, can think kind of objectively about my team - none of these are true of all football fans

i believe some ultras/hooligans - choose whatever name is meaningful in your parlance - will speak derisively of "shirts" to refer to a section of well-behaved, Pavlovian supporters

i guess this as good a thread as any for folks to work out their resentment about the media-cultural prominence given to some professional sports tho

these football cosplayers need to put some effort in. They don't even bother to get the shorts and shoes right & rarely try make-up.

There's a popular tumblr dedicated to mocking people wearing full kit outside of a playing context.

i remember that. full kit on adults is a weird look

Enjoying the avenue we're going down atm, my main thing was the whole BB 'OMG INTERPOL BOYZZZZZ' shit but as she's not here lets carry on with the varying levels of football fanaticism

i like it when people really get into their freakish manias but i hate it when they get together and build some normalized (and trending towards conservative) social conventions around it and adult sports fandom seems like the endpoint of such a thing.

Most enlightening thread

How true is it, really, that adult fandom goes along with being a fuckup of a person?

it doesn't, this is just another 'cool/uncool' thread dressed up as amateur psycholog

as someone who's beefed with BB quite violently in the recent past (and is pretty apologetic for some of the things he said, fwiw - playing the 'you want offensive HERE'S OFFENSIVE' card was deeply crass) I gotta say: this is the lamest going-not-all-the-way-behind-back bitching-session shit I ever did see, and it reeks of self-pity. you're too young to be jaded, dorke. you can still achieve things in your life. no need to start projecting a failure that hasn't necessarily happened yet

I hope Branwell posts here and rips the threadstarter a new one

Oh hang on is this thread someone being snarky

You are not welcome on this thread. Good day to you madam.

Phil D otm

the day online hardman cried

like I genuinely just got IRL dismayed at the prospect of two millionaires leaving spurs to be replaced by two different millionaires who will then perform appointed tasks in that organisation in their stead. idk.

if luka and bale didn't break you nothing will mate

I can't do it again

adult fandom is great. wtf, thread? i'm glad that people's imaginations get captured by stuff, especially if that stuff makes them happy and allows them to meet similarly captured fellow travelers. better than getting all crazy about the rapture or the gold standard or w/e.

full disclosure: my mom cuts pictures of benedict cumberbatch out of waiting room magazines.

I'm confused by this thread too, especially since ilx is full of mostly obsessive fans of all sorts. As far as I know there is no line to cross between fan and fandom. And if there is, where would that line be? I've never been in a fan club or made officially recognised contributions to anything but I'd still say I'm part of many fandoms because I enjoy, support and communicate about these things.

But I do dislike fan consumerism and many other fannish traits intensely and believe that those tendencies destroy the good things. The word "fanboy" is a valid insult in my eyes.

most people - adults, even! - are fans of something or someone to a greater or lesser degree and it just manifests in different ways

an adult with no cultural enthusiasm or the willingness to display it - someone who just stays in their lane and drearily consumes whatever their demographic is supposed to be into - is much weirder and duller than someone unabashedly excited about a sport or author or musician or whatever that they love

fandom is the mechanism by which dreary consumption and lane calcification happens though

I wouldn't consider myself a part of any particular fandom (Fandom?) but I do appreciate that various fandoms exist for things that I like. Like Tuomas, I appreciate there being people who want to have in depth conversations about the media I enjoy. I can also really see the appeal of immersing yourself deeper into a particular world. I think video games offer this opportunity, but I am uniformly terrible at the kind of video games that provide immersive environments, so it is fun sometimes to read websites or "extended universe" stuff about fictional characters I like. Sure some people get really weird about it and tying your identity up completely with somebody else's creative input might cause some problems but people get weird about everything. I guess I mostly see fandoms as harmless often charming hobbies.

Oh god no wait I've gone to multiple Star Trek conventions so I guess I take back the first part of my comment. LLAP.

creative output, not input

Also I think fandom as it originally sprung from the geek/sci fi/Star Trek/slash fic/convention-type mentality is a whole other animal from sports fandom, if for no other reason than liking sports, even fanatically, is considered a normal, positive way of interacting with popular culture, insofar as its strongly encouraged (wear your favorite team jersey to work day, for example) and met with approval. Fandom as in fictional universe fandom is still very much associated with basement dwelling dorks with no social skills, etc. etc. etc., and considered ripe for mocker. Like, when everybody is talking about going to a Cubs game on Saturday I'm sure not going to pipe up "Oh well, there is this movie event where theaters show remastered versions ST:TNG episodes on the big screen!"* So two different animals, IMO.

*Actually I totally would. Fuck the haterz.

soi-disant online hardman explains maturity, sweet sign me up

― every moser (wins), Saturday, 29 March 2014 14:18 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― wins, Friday, 16 May 2014 16:07 (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cool post

Seriously, can't think of a better arbiter of what constitutes adult behavior than a representative of vice magazine who posts pathetically transparent subposts on an internet forum under that name

online hardman is a vice mag rep? great HBO program, dude. kudos.

jk it's a rubbish name

if some dude calls you tanline nerdman will u change it

http://static.thecia.com.au/star-trek/deep-space-nine/7/02b5.jpg
star trek sports fandom

CA killin it itt

Being too cool to express enthusiasm is soooo coool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaKskB43I_M

cool revive

SHOTS FIRED

mods wtf

Dwight Yorke, back with a vengence!

we used to be m8s m8

You were great.

Anyway. What you listening to atm? Into any of the PC Music stuff? I can't get enough of that at the moment.

Thom M aka Jim_F is trying to get me to go see Perfume in Ldn in Nov, fancy a meetup?

gonna ilx message ya

the issues raised in this thread I think have made me less of a spurs fan

thanks tbf

A pretty good piece in the Atlantic about antis in the context of Depp v Heard.

Interesting, disturbing read. Makes sense that the conspiratorial mindset of recent years - qanon, flat earth, anti vaxx - would spread in these ways I guess.

Oh very much so. Horrific to see. The linked tumblr essay in that piece was very good.

The pathologies on display cross over a great deal with what a lot of Americans think about political folks, too

imo, fandom in general trends toward pathology and the stronger it is, the unhealthier it is.

About the only fanatical fandom I think deserves any slack are fans whose lives are so physically constrained that their experience of the world outside of their room(s) is almost entirely mediated, so that apart from meeting their most basic physical needs they live vicariously through identification with their chosen idols. Not coincidentally, the idols of choice among this demographic tend to be athletes.

I recently discovered that there's a zoomer fandom for classic Hollywood, and they even do the "x is cancelled" type discourse around whatever someone in the fandom has dug up on some ancient stars. Today I read the sentence "the stuff that's coming out about Marlene Dietrich is some truly wild shit"; not quite as good as a few days ago tho when I saw someone say "Henry Fonda looks suss fr".