Ooh, fandom, you strange, sometimes beautiful, sometimes not-safe-for-work beast. Trying to explain you to outsiders can be tricky, and fraught with misunderstanding, but visual aids usually help. Even if those visual aids are quite…revealing.
In the above video, fans lend their voices and their fanfiction excerpts to the noble cause of explaining, in simple terms, what fandom is, why so many of us are engaged in it, and why it continues to be popular. Part of PBS’ Off-Book video series, this particular discussion of fandom is mostly for the uninitiated, but it’s still fun as a fan to watch familiar pictures of convention cosplayers, Bronies, and various fanart fly by in a semi-scholarly fashion. It’s hardly the most broad handling of the topic, though it gets some good main points across. However, the video makers seem to have gone out of their way to find some fairly obscure fandom tracks to explore. Somehow, I don’t think using erotic Transformers fanfiction or the (thankfully brief) Colorado shooter James Holmes trolling fandom flare-up makes a good case for fans largely being rational, if passionate, people, and not crazy loners hanging out in our basements with a high-speed web connection.
Judge for yourselves, Internet.
