Which fandoms are you actively involved in?

Cafe Society
1

By “actively involved”, I mean you regularly spend time, online or in person, interacting with your fellow fans in some way.

I’m a fan of many books, but in terms of fandom I have three major ones.

  1. Silmarillion

What keeps me involved: In a word, fanfiction.
I can’t say why, exactly, but when I first started reading fanfic, something about Tolkien’s world just clicked with me. First Age Disaster Elves… double-clicked with me? Anyway. I just kept reading and reading and reading, and somewhere along the line I passed the Nerd Event Horizon. The Silm fandom hits the sweet spot of being popular enough that the stories keep coming, but not so popular that it’s ninety-percent grammatically-challenged thirteen-year-olds writing self-inserts; checking out what’s new on AO3 is relatively Safe For Brain.

Involvement

  • Read/comment on fanfiction
  • Write fanfiction
  • Belong to fandom-specific fic archive
  • Belong to fandom-specific Discord
  • Participate in Back To Middle-earth Month
  1. Order of the Stick

What keeps me involved: OOTS updates on a relatively regular basis (compared to, say, most print series); fertile wild mass guessing ground combined with a community of hardcore WMGers; frequent Words of God from the author (and a forum database cataloging them).

Involvement

  • Belong to fandom-specific message board
  • Know IRL fans
  • Backed a Kickstarter
  1. Cosmere

What keeps me involved: Brandon Sanderson’s writing speed means there’s always a fresh book; multi-series interconnected universe; fertile theorizing ground combined with a community of hard-core theorizers; frequent Words of God from the author (and a website cataloging them).

Involvement

  • Read/comment on fanfiction
  • Belong to fandom-specific message board
  • Follow Tor rereads
  • Backed a Kickstarter
  • Joined Cosmere/Stormlight Reddits
2

I’d just like to say, before this thread really gets started, that I am so impressed with (and a little jealous of) people who have the dedication and free time to be involved at this level.

I have friends who send me links to stuff; music, TV, movies, or live theater offerings. It’s all I can do to prioritize one or two things to make sure to get to in a week. While they’re all asking “Did you watch that 4 hour Monsieur Hulot/Macbeth mashup yet?” “Whadja think of Warhol’s Empire? Ya gotta watch til the end!” “You binged all of The Simpsons last night, right?”

They seem to have 4-6 hours a day to devote to their favorite media… hmmm, maybe if I weren’t posting here…