Since I know that most people will give more detailed comments about specificities, I'm going to mention personal experience as an illustration.
As an undergraduate, my university had (and still has) a Science Fiction and Fantasy club and an anime club. Now, a significant portion of the sci-fi people really seemed to fit the older-male-no-social-skills stereotype. A VERY significant portion -- to the point where it seemed that the only social life these individuals ever had were the Tuesday night club meetings. And because the sci-fi club attracted so many of these individuals, it reached a point where quite a few of the women in the sci-fi club fled to the anime club, which had originally been an offshoot, in order to get out of what they felt was a rather toxic culture.
The anime club, in contrast, had a more equal mix. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the ratio of women to men was 60-40, perhaps even as high as 70-30 on some evenings. I served as an club officer for several years, and in my final year there were four female and two male officers -- a pattern repeated in the elections for the year after. And the mileau, I found, wasn't quite so toxic. You were an anime fan, yes, but you were also other things: a literary geek, a musician, a scientist, a psychologist, an artist, a budding politician. To put it crudely, you had a life outside anime, and everyone accepted it. With the sci-fi club, it often seemed that many of the club members didn't really have that outside life, and made it uncomfortable and unwelcoming for people who did. I admit that there were anime club members whose lives seemed to revolve solely around anime, too, but they were far fewer in number.
So that's an example from personal experience. The strongest difference between real fans (apart from the stereotypes) is between those who cannot separate the fandom from the reality, and those who can. Even if it might LOOK like you've gone overboard in fandom, dressing up in costumes and such, as long as you're aware of the irony of what you're doing, you haven't reached that rather toxic stereotypical level yet. If someone set out to learn Klingon, I wouldn't point to him/her as a stereotypical fan UNLESS their motivation for doing so was just to be 'more of a fan' than someone who didn't know Klingon. Does that make sense?
As an undergraduate, my university had (and still has) a Science Fiction and Fantasy club and an anime club. Now, a significant portion of the sci-fi people really seemed to fit the older-male-no-social-skills stereotype. A VERY significant portion -- to the point where it seemed that the only social life these individuals ever had were the Tuesday night club meetings. And because the sci-fi club attracted so many of these individuals, it reached a point where quite a few of the women in the sci-fi club fled to the anime club, which had originally been an offshoot, in order to get out of what they felt was a rather toxic culture.
The anime club, in contrast, had a more equal mix. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the ratio of women to men was 60-40, perhaps even as high as 70-30 on some evenings. I served as an club officer for several years, and in my final year there were four female and two male officers -- a pattern repeated in the elections for the year after. And the mileau, I found, wasn't quite so toxic. You were an anime fan, yes, but you were also other things: a literary geek, a musician, a scientist, a psychologist, an artist, a budding politician. To put it crudely, you had a life outside anime, and everyone accepted it. With the sci-fi club, it often seemed that many of the club members didn't really have that outside life, and made it uncomfortable and unwelcoming for people who did. I admit that there were anime club members whose lives seemed to revolve solely around anime, too, but they were far fewer in number.
So that's an example from personal experience. The strongest difference between real fans (apart from the stereotypes) is between those who cannot separate the fandom from the reality, and those who can. Even if it might LOOK like you've gone overboard in fandom, dressing up in costumes and such, as long as you're aware of the irony of what you're doing, you haven't reached that rather toxic stereotypical level yet. If someone set out to learn Klingon, I wouldn't point to him/her as a stereotypical fan UNLESS their motivation for doing so was just to be 'more of a fan' than someone who didn't know Klingon. Does that make sense?
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