Reflection #12
What did you learn about your fandom? What creative work does your fandom perform? What further work could you do?
I learned that my fandom is still alive! When I started, I was worried that the Nabari no Ou community would have shriveled up and turned to dust. But we are very much still alive and well. Other than that, I can’t say I’ve learned much else. That’s not a fault of the class-I just came in already knowing loads about my fandoms and fandom in general. It’s kind of my thing.
As for creative work, fanart is definitely the most popular outlet. This became pretty obvious when I hosted a fanworks contest and all the entries turned out to be art even though I said fic, art, and vid would all be accepted. Fanfic and fanvids exist of course; roleplaying and cosplaying are also popular. But the biggest creative work for the Nabari fandom is certainly the fanart.
There’s a lot of further work that could be done. For one thing, fandoms for non-Western productions tend to get snubbed a lot during fandom studies discussions and unjustly so. Non-Western fandoms make up a huge portion of internet fandoms-from manga and anime to video games and music! Since they get snubbed, there is a lot of about these communities that have been left largely unexplored.
In particular, I personally would like to examine what other-media adaption does to, and for, a fandom. This is a fairly important question for manga fandoms because manga is often adapted into a anime or vice versa. It is widely accepted that getting an anime adaption brings more fans to a fandom, but what else? With such a massive influx of new fans, there must be more that happens than a simple increase in population.
I learned that my fandom is still alive! When I started, I was worried that the Nabari no Ou community would have shriveled up and turned to dust. But we are very much still alive and well. Other than that, I can’t say I’ve learned much else. That’s not a fault of the class-I just came in already knowing loads about my fandoms and fandom in general. It’s kind of my thing.
As for creative work, fanart is definitely the most popular outlet. This became pretty obvious when I hosted a fanworks contest and all the entries turned out to be art even though I said fic, art, and vid would all be accepted. Fanfic and fanvids exist of course; roleplaying and cosplaying are also popular. But the biggest creative work for the Nabari fandom is certainly the fanart.
There’s a lot of further work that could be done. For one thing, fandoms for non-Western productions tend to get snubbed a lot during fandom studies discussions and unjustly so. Non-Western fandoms make up a huge portion of internet fandoms-from manga and anime to video games and music! Since they get snubbed, there is a lot of about these communities that have been left largely unexplored.
In particular, I personally would like to examine what other-media adaption does to, and for, a fandom. This is a fairly important question for manga fandoms because manga is often adapted into a anime or vice versa. It is widely accepted that getting an anime adaption brings more fans to a fandom, but what else? With such a massive influx of new fans, there must be more that happens than a simple increase in population.