Because of Reasons, some definitions:
- Consumptive fandom, is primarily concerned with having “the most” of something. For example, “the most comics books”, “the most Lord of the Rings trivia”, “the most Supernatural convention attendances.” Often associated with “male” or “mainstream” fandom, i.e. the sort of fandom multinational mega-corporations find profitable.
- Creative fandom, also known as transformative fandom. Primarily interested in taking existing fandom canon and making it into something Other. The domain of fanfic and meta, but also fanvids and, in some contexts, fanart. Traditionally coded “female” and/or “queer” or otherwise subversive. Frequently in conflict with consumptive fandom, over what counts as a “real fan” in the context of that fandom.
- Curative fandom, often conflated with consumptive fandom but distinctly different. Curative fans are the tastemakers and “influences” of fandom works within fandom itself. Known for having “the best” of something. For example, “the best Venom MPREG recs”, “the best fandom meta”, “the best Rose Quartz fusion fanart reblogs”. Frequently in conflict with creative fandom, almost always over access and archiving.
More Thoughts On This Issue withheld, but… for the moment? This.
This is interesting, and I think you did an excellent job with these definitions.
(Also, I love your icon)
💜
This… doesn’t track at all with my experiences of what most people call “curation” activities within fandom, which mostly fall under your “consumptive” heading. The chief concern of wikis, stat databases, canon guides/breakdowns, and nerdy-ass compendiums about the weapons capabilities of various fictional spacefleets isn’t racking up high-score points?! It’s organizing knowledge and making it accessible. Yes, people get into dick-swinging contests where knowledge is the currency, and yes, there are strong ties between knowledge-curation and collector subfandoms. But this strikes me as an inaccurate and terribly dismissive characterization of non-transformative modes of fandom.
fandom
Yes, I was also confused by the definition of curating as making lists of “the best” when often I think of it as lists of *everything*. (I think “best of” lists are a subset of this to be sure, but not the entire category.)
And being primarily on the creative end, I don’t consider myself in conflict with the people who organize all these facts about a fandom. In fact, I depend on them. I’m always looking things up when I’m writing. “What was the name of that one character who was in a couple episodes in season two? Do vampires turn to dust in this universe when you behead them or is there a body to dispose of? Was this character ever married before?” I don’t know what I would do if someone far more organized than myself hadn’t kept track of all these things.
Re: fandom
I think people are getting overly hung-up on the wording of “the best”, which is my bad lol; I meant it as a general utility statement, not necessarily exclusively “the best” as in “I read six hundred fics and here are the Top 10!” (though it can be!).
So for the purpose of this definition, assume “best” can also include things like “most complete”, “most well-organized”, and so on. The point is that I think curative fandom differentiates from consumptive fandom in that curative fandom produces a public (or semi-public) output; an archive, a recs list, a wiki, whatever, that’s often descriptive of the items (e.g. is tagged, etc.), but usually not interrogative of the items (which would be transformative). Consumptive fandom is just… consuming a Thing, be that buying an action figure, watching a film, or whatever.
Also, needless to say, I don’t think these activities are necessarily exclusionary or that people only operate in “one mode, always and forever”, and that there are edge cases and overlaps and so on. So when I talk about “creative fandom” or whatever it’s awkward shorthand for the activities people are doing, rather than the people themselves per se.
(I also think there’s a Big Argument over whether all “creative” fandom is necessarily transformative. I… can see myself being persuaded either way.)
Then (having been on both sides of this issue at various times) you’re lucky and I envy you, lol.
Or, less flippantly… yes and no. I think there’s an ongoing tension between creative fandom and curative fandom, for which in evidence I submit the endless numbers of times this argument has come and gone. :P
And, to be clear, I don’t mean “conflict” in the sense of “rawr these opposing parties will never get along!”. I mean it in the sense of, “This relationship is mutually symbiotic within fandom but can clash due to the different general operaing assumptions of both groups.”
It’s also worth noting that:
1. Your “consumptive” and “curative” definitions are inherently competitive along a highly (and IMO uncharitably) simplified axis, but the “transformative” one simply describes an activity. I don’t think that’s accurate; creative fandom is no more or less prone to competitive one-upsmanship than any other corner. The reality is that people will get into dick-swinging contests about whatever the local currency happens to be–whether that’s canon knowledge, community knowledge, collectibles, or ships and headcanons. Transformative fandom is in total fucking denial that we do this because our dick-swinging contests are couched in moral judgement and bastardized social-justice language about who’s Doing Representation Right or who’s a horrible problematic unperson. As alluded to on Mastodon, I find this about a hundred times more stressful and psychologically damaging than dumb trivia contests that know they’re about dumb trivia. It’s a bug, not a feature.
2. You say “influencers and tastemakers,” I say “people who curate knowledge of their own fandom culture/history so it can be transmissible and legible to other fans.” Tomayto, tomahto, the conflicts between creators and curators are the same, but if we’re going to talk about what people are trying to accomplish with their fandom engagement, we might as well talk about their actual motivations rather than a flippant outsider view that compares them to people using their follower count to hawk toothpaste on Instagram. Again–the essence of it isn’t a competitive race for some mythical “best,” it’s about organizing and sharing access to knowledge, in this case sifting signal from noise to provide one-stop shopping for people interested in a particular topic within fandom. Lord knows I have my quarrels with some ways to do it, and the drama when people compete based on this is insufferable, but if every corner of fandom is defined by its crassest wankers then transformative fandom is no less deep in the shit-heap.
Consumptive, definitely for sure, though I freely admit this is a kind of pseudo-Marxist analysis about the tendency for capital to exploit cultivated identities and gamified fandom for the purpose of selling products, and for that mode of operation to be so prevalent in our neoliberal post-capitalist society that it’s always always unconsciously mimicked in other areas even where capital isn’t necessarily involved. Obviously, this is an Extremely Specific Leftist Position and if you don’t (a-har) buy it, you… won’t buy the conclusion.
Curative… sort of, but probably with slightly different drivers. See previous comments re. me admitting I’ve worded this badly.
Agreed, and this is my omission; I’ve stated elsewhere I think that when creative/transformative fandom gets gamified, it does so on a combination “most/best” axis, i.e. it’s generally good to be known as both “the best” (under caveats re. the wording of best as mentioned previously) and the most prolific (otherwise known as “produce stuff people like and produce it often”).
Again, see previous statement about the wording of “the best” being not, er. The best. But fundamentally I also think “organizing and sharing access to knowledge”… is a kind of competitive race to be “the best” (at organizing and sharing access to knowledge). I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense, just a descriptive one and, to be clear, I’m not talking about personal motivations; I’m talking about how The Activity (regardless of “mode”) tends to be received by fandom more broadly. So any one individual may choose to create any one curative archive (or creative fanwork, or consumptive collection, or whatever) for any number of internal personal reasons. But from the outsider perspective, the results of those activities tend to be gamified in specific ways. If that makes sense?
That… is an extremely specific take, indeed, and while it’s indisputable that commercialization/gamification/corporate exploitation of fandom is an increasingly huge thing, I haven’t seen much to convince me that it applies to every fan activity or has its sticky fingers in every competitive tendency within fandom.
But fundamentally I also think “organizing and sharing access to knowledge”… is a kind of competitive race to be “the best”
I… really don’t see what’s inherently competitive about “oh hey, I have seen a lot of people seeking knowledge about Thing X and I am pretty familiar with Thing X, let me fill the gap with what I’ve got.” It’s inherently susceptible to competition–just like everything else, including transformative fan activities, and if being susceptible to it makes it an inherent part of how it’s characterized then there’s no reason for transformative fandom to be omitted. Lord knows competing over Interpretive Woke Points has already been subject to extensive, often extremely successful, corporate exploitation, and that the nasty underbelly that makes it a “bug” in fanwork culture has also been weaponized to ensure that entire creative careers are easily disposable once an entity that knows how to play the game finds them inconvenient.
I don’t think it’s involved in every fan activity, but I think it’s, a) the current primary driver of consumptive fandom (though I’d be open to an argument that the intensity of this is a relatively recent thing), and b) also spreading as a default mode across fandom more broadly, which is I think where a lot of conflict between what I will highly problematically call Old Fandom versus New Fandom comes from. See for example recent debates about monetizing fanworks, treating your fandom presence as a “brand”, the capitalization of parasocial relationships in for e.g. the YouTuber and podcast communities, and so on.
Like, to be Extremely Marxist about it, I do kinda think that, ultimately, pretty much all modern wankstorms in fandom can at least in some way be described in the context of the (usually not conscious) incursion of hypercapitalist modes of operation into a space that has historically not been about them. Like, even to the point of anti drama; the idea of a single ship/headcanon/interpretation/whatever taking over to the point of being the One True Thing is extremely “out-compete everything to take over the entire market” which, y’know. Is pretty much capital-letter Capitalism in a nutshell, so…
(Also, like… I don’t think this is the only factor, obviously, but I do think it’s A Factor, and I think it’s one that’s not discussed much because, ew. Marxism, lol.)
Again, because I’m not talking about individual motivations per se. Someone might start an archive or contribute to a wiki for any number of non competitive reasons, but I think the reasons that archive or that wiki (or whatever) become “popular”/well known/whatever are competitive.
And, like. I don’t think this is necessarily negative or malicious or being done in bad faith or whatever; it can be, but I think it most cases it’s not. But I do think the systemic outcomes shake out like this. It’s Marketplace of Ideas Theory 101, basically which, FWIW, is a system I have issues with in general, hence saying this stuff is descriptive of how I think things are in fandom rather than prescriptive about how I think they necessarily should be.
I also think it tends to make people really uncomfortable to talk about this stuff in this way, again because people are used to thinking about things in extremely hyper-individualist terms (read: pretty much everything in at least Western society encourages people to think about things this way) that can sometimes make “talking about a system” difficult to conceptually decouple from “talking about my personal relationship to the system.” Like, they’re both interesting questions! They’re just… not the same question, IMO.
Which, on the one hand, is Extremely Overthinking It for the purpose of “lol fandom drama” but, also… is kinda the framework I’m coming from more broadly, so… /shrug
Huh. I am thinking here of the Earthsea compendium, which is… popular… among people who write Earthsea fic? Because it’s the only one. Because there was only one person who was willing to take the time to make that wiki. And the way I found out about it I would characterize less as “competitive popularity” than “web of relationships led me here.”
I mean, this is just one example, but I would have to agree with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets. Curativce fandom is susceptible to competition (perhaps very much so), but competition isn’t inherent to it.
Interestingly, I was linked to this entry through a curated list. I’m not sure what that says about curation as an activity; just thought I’d throw it out there.
That it’s the engine of discovery that makes fandom go around. *jazz hands* :P
Seriously, though, that’s kind the Main Point about why I think curative fandom activities are separate from consumptive ones; curative activities promote fandom communities in a way purely consumptive ones generally don’t. Neither is “bad” or “wrong” or “better” than the other (if nothing else, you generally need to consume something before you can be fannish enough about it to perform curative/transformative activities for it!), they’re just… different modes of operation.
Huh. I’ve always assumed consumptive fandom falls under curative fandom, because… well, it’s what a lot of nerdboy fandom is. Who can recite the most trivia, who has the most encyclopedic knowledge of The Thing In Question, who has memorised the most lore, who can give out “ranked lists” of the thing in some nebulous order of preference that is trying to be “objective”
while probably failing to recognise that all taste is subjectiveAnd then transformative fandom is… more the part that goes “yes but what does it all mean“/”I have some constructive criticism”/”Look I drew a fanart/wrote a fanfic/wrote some meta/[otherwise used the thing as a jumping off point to create something new and expand either within or without the borders of the lore]”
Yeah, that’s the “usual” way of looking at it I think (it tends to get smushed together as “collector” fandom), but I also… do think there’s a difference between fandom activities that largely only impact an individual (i.e. consumptive fandom, which tends to take Things and put them in inaccessible private collections, physical or metaphorical) and activities that have a community impact (i.e. curative, which is usually about creative public or semi-public archives, libraries, and so on). Hence separating them out. 6^^
Great definitions. I’ll be saving this to memories for reference when I want to compare & contrast these three sub-types of fandoms.
I agree with what others have said about consumptive fandom often being categorized together with curative fandom. Or rather, that fans active in both those types of fandom share highly similar priorities i.e. they are confident in having curated the best because they have consumed the most.
I’ve been noticing some overlap between consumptive and creative fandom in the creation of non-traditional fanworks that don’t take much time or artistic/technological skills to create. Examples of these are liveblogs, funny shitposts and fandom memes–what a fan can create nearly immediately or even during the consumption of canon. The overlap gets more pronounced when more fans willing to slow down their consumption to take the time to be creative and create, especially when there’s a supportive community that assures it’s ok to be subversive by the standards of people outside of fandom (YKINMKATOK, in other words).
Thanks for the definitions.
I’m going to spin it larger in my own space and take a look at it, but these particular ways of looking at it seem to highlight, for me, the ways that what would be normal activities can get corrupted to competitive, capitalist-looking ends. Not that there’s a Platonic form of pure fandom, because we’re all humans, and the ego-boosts that come from being a superlative are really good.
It’s been a good thing to chew on. Thanks again.
Thank you! 💜