Signal boost: Why Avengers has eaten fandom, by Fabula Rasa

[amanuensis1]

So I fell and fell hard, and a lot of you did too--what was it about Avengers that made it a Fandom Global Event? For the definition of that term and some speculation why it happened, check out fabularasa's blogspot post, A Unified Theory of Fandom. Agree, disagree, discuss.

Comments

[pauraque]

I'm suspicious of the idea that you can say much about the typology of internet mega-fandoms when there have only been a handful of them. HP is a clear contender, but it didn't actually come on suddenly, it built popularity over several years on the strength of the books, then the movies, then the takeoff of LJ. Avengers, I would argue, didn't come on suddenly either -- there are the comics, and then the other movies, and now one movie that incorporates characters from all of them. The fandom is also riding the rising popularity of Tumblr, just as HP rode the wave of LJ. It seems very early to claim that Avengers will have the staying power of HP, though.

The other obvious example is X-Files, though perhaps it's not as obvious for people who weren't there. It also built its popularity over several years, and rode its way to massiveness on a forum that was new to most people -- the internet itself. The internet itself was much smaller back then, but in terms of saturation, XF fandom was where HP has been, and where Avengers is now. I started going online BECAUSE of that show, and so did many of my RL friends. Looking at that blog post, XF had cleverness and magic in spades, but it did not have a large cast of characters, nor was it male-focused -- on the contrary, it had one of the most widely beloved and widely ficced-about female leads in any fandom ever... if you like het, of course. XF slash, like most slash fandoms, was of course focused on the manpain of pretty white guys, which is a thing about fandom that has always left me very underwhelmed, and continues to do so.

[fabularasa.livejournal.com]

That's interesting -- I started going online because of XF, too!

And you're right, it's hard to make generalizations when there has only even been one real mega-fandom that ate the universe. My points are facile and easily perforated, but I like to poke at things, and Avengers, and the force with which it hit (at least in my corner of fandom) has really surprised me. I myself am both facile and easily perforated, so feel free to poke back.

Does this mean I am going to have to figure out how Tumblr works?