First Rule of Fandom: Don’t Talk About Fandom
The first rule of fandom is that we don’t talk about fandom, not to people who aren’t part of fandom at least. What does this rule mean, and why does it exist? Well, it means that people writing copious amounts of fanfiction probably don’t talk about it with their boss, their peers who aren’t in fandom, and definitely not their parents. It’d just be weird.
The fandom I’m talking about here is the broader online community known more specifically as transformative fandom. It’s a community spanning multiple social media platforms where people read and write fanfiction, create fan videos, draw fanart, and geek out about all sorts of media. For those of you who don’t know, fanfiction is a type of creative work that transforms a source material. Someone might write an alternative ending to the Game of Thrones television series or the offscreen adventures of Captain Kirk and his crew.
Since before it existed online, fandom has held many intricate social norms that keep the community safe, which makes it an excellent place to observe how social norms interact with online platforms.
Many of fandom’s norms are from before the community migrated online. Unspoken rules like “don’t talk about fandom” developed out of the community’s need for secrecy back in the 70s. Media property owners weren’t so thrilled about fans writing, illustrating, and distributing fanworks, especially fanworks featuring sexually explicit content. So even before the dawn of the internet, fans had learned that in order to keep fandom safe they had to be careful about who could know about it.
And after fandom went online, authors threatening to sue fan writers for plagiarism among other privacy and safety issues ensured that fandom maintained those norms to this day. In an interview study, we spoke to 25 members of fandom to learn more about their unspoken rules, how they enforce them, and what goes wrong when people violate those rules.
When fans talked about unspoken rules in fandom, they referenced ways they saw people break those rules. For example, participants described the uncomfortable feeling of watching people get harassed for making a mistake in illustrating a character or being a fan of something contentious (for example, Kylo Ren and Rey from Star Wars as a romantic pairing). They explained that, instead, fans are supposed to not judge each other for the things they are fans of. This rule helps prevent harassment in online fan spaces that are generally open to the public.
For the past several years, fan communities have gathered on open platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, where there aren’t that many tools available to users to preserve their privacy and safety. Not only did participants express fears over being harassed, they worried that their online data would wander away without knowing it. Journalists can swoop in and gather up fan art for their Top 10 Sexy Vampires From Your Favorite Shows article without asking permission from fan artists. One participant explained that this can be pretty scary if a fan artist doesn’t want their art style to be recognized by friends and relatives. It’s one thing for your family to know you like to draw stuff, but it’s another if that includes shirtless glittery vampires. Specifically, it can be a problem for LGBTQ+ fans that are in the closet at home but illustrating explicitly gay fanart online.
The social norms that govern fandom are in place to protect community members from bad things happening, bad things that can’t always be prevented by the social media sites the community relies on. Our participants showed us that, even though people know these norms and how to follow them, there are vulnerabilities to these norms that can still lead to major privacy and safety problems. However, we can consider opportunities to design better platforms by paying attention to when social norms break down, where their vulnerabilities are, and how the community suffers for being unable to enforce those norms more effectively.
We provide specific examples of how social norm vulnerability can hurt an online community and propose ways to help that community from multiple different perspectives. You can read more about Social Norm Vulnerability and its Consequences for Privacy and Safety and consider ways to help online communities remain safe and positive spaces.
