The Growth of a Fandom
A couple weeks ago, I was working on catching up on CLDK and started feeling a little burned out, so I went to Tumblr to check the RoosterTeeth tag. The tag is mostly posts about the latest Red vs Blue or whatever videos have come out during the week, but occassionally there's fanart or even a little fic here or there. It's fairly quiet and I think it's because RT is a real company made of real people.
Each of the member has their own tags as well, and I was checking through them one by one when I realized a lot of the "Michael Jones" (the Rage Quit guy) posts also contained tags for "Gavin Free," "michaelgavin," and "mavin."
At first I couldn't believe it. Shippers? For real people? Michael has a girlfriend and who knows what the hell Gavin's dating situation is but c'mon. Shipping real people seems... taboo to me.
And for a while I left it at that. I'd check the RT tag and a few of the individual guys, but never checked the michaelgavin or mavin tags. But then Rage Quit: Slender 2 went up and the tags EXPLODED and I got curious.
I checked one day and it was mostly reblogs of RQ: Slender 1 and/or 2 or other videos they'd both been in. One girl had a list of podcasts they'd been on together. And there was one 3-part fic that I read and it was terrible. Ugh, why did I even bother?! This wasn't a fandom, it was just girls looking for evidence where there wasn't any.
But then it occurred to me that really, that's all anyone does on CLDK or in any fandom - Sherlock Holmes, Sailor Moon, all the way back to Star Trek where the ideas got started. And I shouldn't look down on them because really, the only reason the fandom wasn't that great was because it was so small.
This was about 2 weeks ago. I tracked the two associated tags on my tumblr and every day the "new posts" numbers next to it get higher more quickly. The fics these girls are writing are getting better. The art is still lacking but I think there's less need for it here considering that they put out content almost every day, where in other fandoms the art is to fill the gap between seasons or episodes or whatever.
What's shocked me the most is how much it snuck up on me. I went from "oh man, this is not correct at all" to "omg I wonder what's new on the mavin tag this afternoon?!" and I can't even fathom how it happened. And the REALLY weird part is while I'm highly enjoying this ship, it's not terribly active - if I come across a video that I haven't seen in the tag, I'll link it, but I'm not actively posting/reblogging EVERYTHING. When the new videos come out, I watch like a normal viewer, then head to the tag to see what the others saw in it, but I don't look for it like they do.
I broke my rule about shipping real people but somehow it's okay. I'm not sure why. And I don't think it's gonna be a gateway drug into other ships of real people either. Hmmm.
Yeah, I just wanted to ramble on about this. I like studying how people work and this has been a really neat observation.