Fandoms that I’m Not In, but reuglarly interact with:
Homestuck: Like oompa-loompas leaping out of the woodwork at the drop of secret words or phrases. Generally Amiable to nonHomestucks, but often vicious with each other, so the trick is the same as when visiting the lands of the fairfolk: Never Actually Consume The Wares Offered.
Star Trek: By Osmosis, I know three (3) Star Trek Memes, but only know how to spell 2 of them (Tarmac Angel Lard Et Tokugawa?). Massive, old and rife with hidden politics and some very exotic deviances. Not Unlike my expiriences with the Catholic Church.
Transformers: Star Wars’ dumpsterfire of canon issues looks like a smoldering wastepaper basket compared to the chernobyl-like meltdown of Transformers Canon. Fandom is somehow extraordinalrity polite, well organized and pleasant. Like they’re having High Tea with the Fine China and Cucumber Sandwiches whils illuminated by the burning of Rome.
Steven Universe: The Show is like a coming-of-age tale set in the thunderdome, but the fandom is Thunderdome set in a McDonald’s Playplace.
Supernatural: *Viva Lad Vida faintly plays on the sad winds that echo through the ruined throne room, but the cockroaches picking at the moldering buffet seem to be having a great time*
Discworld: Listen. Listen I wholly admit to worshipping at the Altar of Sir Terry, but after a while, comparing things to discworld starts to feel like the dreaded art “compliment” of “It looks just like Disney!”. Let people have thier own creations.
Warhammer 40K: For people working with the Grimmest and Darkest of AUs, everyone here is spectacularly jolly and irreverent, at least until you bring up the price of miniatures.
Dr. Who: It comes and goes with wildly different actions and discourse every time, like the haploid and diploid generations of plants.
Star Wars: Is omitted from this list because I’m deep enough in the fandom that I’ve been through all five stages of grief and seven more stages of emotions that do not have names in the tongues of men, and have achived the nirvana of “The Fandom is those 12 people in your chat group”
Star Wars’ dumpsterfire of canon issues looks like a smoldering wastepaper basket compared to the chernobyl-like meltdown of Transformers Canon.
As a Transformers fan, I love you.
Also as a Transformers fan, this brought me joy.
And as someone experiencing the Steven Universe fandom through the lens of my significant other and looking on in utter horror, yep. very yep.
Pls someone tell me how Dragon Age fandom looks from the outside.
Dragon Age: Absolutely everyone is furious with an egg. Even the people that want to fuck the egg. There’s also a BSDM Minotaur and Oscar Wilde with a tan and some guy with a bloodsmear on his face that he’s either studiously applied every morning for like a decade or he never washes his face both options sound equally plausible. There’s some kind of issue with videogame developers trying to discuss social justice issues and completely fucking it up and y’all keep acting like that’s an unexpected outcome. Perhaps the Egg is the writing team’s self-Insert OC?
Also there’s dwarf with excellent man-clevage and for some reason you can’t romance him despite being apparently the best character in the entire series.
Now, this makes me curious about the outside perspective of The Elder Scrolls and Warcraft fandoms.
The Elder Scrolls: How does a game series with lore like “If you get up high enough on certain mountains you can still see the smoldering remains of where an asteroid almost hit, was stopped by a god, had a city built into it, the god died, and then the asteroid hit full-force becuase he’d only delayed it’s impact” and “Someone once stole the moon” LOOK SO FUCKING BORING HAS BETH ESDA NEVER SEEN A FULL-SATURATION COLOR BEFORE?? Visual monotony aside, I can see how you end up playing this obsessively for weeks and end up speaking the dragon-exploding language, even if sometimes the game has a meltdown and elephants fall out of the sky.
Actually I’m not even sure that’s a glitch that just sounds like practical world-building at this rate.
World Of Warcraft: it’s like the exact opposite of Elder scrolls- the games look baller as fuck and like a fun fanstasy adventure where you can live out your neon-colored pseudo-furry dreams and then the gameplay is a more time consuming version of an Introduction to Microeconomics class. Really if you’re any kind of good at WoW you should be able to use it for college credit. Every WoW fan i’ve ever met has been kind enough to stop explaining it to me once my eyesstarted to glaze over and if you draw their OCs they pay extrememly well.
Requested from the comments:
JoJo’s Bizzare Adventure:
JJBA uses every color that Elder Scrolls didn’t. Everyone looks and moves like Buster Keaton on amphetamines and steroids. Nobody knows what’s going on, least of all the people actually in the show. It’s very pretty and possibly gay and rock and roll references abound so you don’t really need context. The cosplay community is fucking killing it. It looks like something I really, really want to get into but the dog dies in the first ep and honestly that threw me.
Naruto: Naruto people don’t like the series- they like the unexplored potential of the characters and setting and thematic elements and virtually every narrative structure kishimoto could have used but didn’t. It hasn’t expirienced “death of the author” so much as “cataclysmic extinction of the author”, in which the fans sift for bits of passable canon like paleontologists looking for bone fragments. The reconstructions have little to no basis in canon but are gorgeous.
Marvel: Like Transformers, The ships are made up and the canon doesn’t matter. Fandom overall is much gentler and cozier than the source material, which isn’t unusual but marvel takes it to a spectacular degree. Coffee shop AUs, Stark Tower Sleepover Parties, and “everyone has a loving family, one way or another” abounds. Everyone wants to take the muscley, tortured heroes (and villians) of the franchise and put them in fleece footie Pajamas.
…90% of the time. The remaining 10% of the time they’re gonna take the knife canon shoved in that character’s back, coat it in acid, make it long enough to kill thier BBF too and TWIST. Marvel fandom does hurt/comfort like a shot of hydrochloric acid followed by seventeen gallons of hot chocolate with sprinkes and marshmallows and candycanes and unicorns.