Not sure if this thread belongs here or in IMHO, but I was talking with a colleague about fandom this week, and we seemed to come to the conclusion that (context of fictional works in books, film, TV) every fanbase we can think of, is in some way quite worthy of (gentle) mockery and scorn, or so people outside of the fanbase will generally tend to think. Their dressing up and behaving is a pale shadow of the work which they dearly love. Fans are a bit pathetic, is what we think we resolved.
So the question is: Which fanbase is the least pathetic? I think in order to answer this, you can’t be part of that fanbase, or else you can’t be sure you’re not just rationalising and making excuses. Is there a fiction fanbase that is generally respected and looked up to by outsiders?
Does it require a certain critical mass to become pathetic? I suspect there are lots of relatively obscure bands, authors, etc. with non-pathetic fanbases that you just never hear about.
I consider myself a Gormenghast fanboy, for which fandom seems to include just me and literary critic Harold Bloom. He died a couple months ago, so that leaves me looking kind of pathetic.
Tony, Silvio, Paulie Walnuts, and the rest of the crew were big fans. Now they were fictional, but I don’t think that’s too far off the mark.
I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. Even if they weren’t connected, you wouldn’t want to mess with most of the Godfather fans in the neighborhood.
Then you’re not looking in the right places. Lots of folks mock them for trying to make the fictional world “real” and paint over the contradictions, errors, etc. Asmiov commented negatively on their mindset a few times. And he also wrote mysteries and hung out with other such writers.
Regarding the size of a fanbase. If the fanbase is size one, then it is intrinsically pathetic but perhaps not in the same sense as the OP.
While some of the recent pearl-clutching around the BBC Night Watch series contradicts this, I’ve generally found Discworld’s fandom a lot less cringe-inducing than most. I think it’s because there’s sort of a general agreement that the books are very good but not flawless, that it’s okay to disagree and discuss what their best and worst aspects are, and that the morality of being thoughtful, attentive, compassionate, and bold bled out of Pratchett’s pen directly into many of his readers.
The stuff that puts me off of “fandoms,” like the weird sense of ownership/entitlement that the fans have over the source material, the heavy focus on shipping characters, the obsessive / objectifying fan art, or unhealthy levels of self-association with characters or organizations, seems pretty minimal.
I think there are two things that make big fans of one thing look ‘pathetic’ or ‘weird’ to people who are not big fans of that thing. First one is the stop-liking-a-thing-I-don’t-like mentality a whole lot of people have. It spills over into why do you love this thing that I find ‘meh’ at best so much? You’re pathetic!
The other thing is, if you gather a group of over, say, 20 people-- there are gonna be weirdos. At least someone who other people think is weird.
I think it was in Sammy Gravano’s book where he said all real life mobsters love the Godfather movies. Or maybe it was in Wiseguy book about Henry Hill which became the movie Goodfellas. BTW , they changed the name for the movie because there was a TV show at the time called Wiseguy.
