We gotta talk about Anti-Fandom

To be honest, I'd rather be writing fan fiction than talking about this. It's been something stewing within me for years and only recently have I felt like I've had the real words to put to this. I haven't written them down because I'm afraid I might be wrong in this, but I can't sit with this forever.

We'll start with my functional definition of "anti-fandom", as an official definition might do it justice but I want to put it in my own words for what I see right now. We still include the outright "hater", someone who just plain doesn't like the fandom source and is there to drag it down for their own satisfaction. But, in more recent years, I've seen a few particular types of fan that I want to include in this definition. There's the person whose fandom has clearly expired and are holding on to the fandom out of pride and/or spite. There's the person whose fandom is a bit more shallow than the typical fan but is faking depth to fit in. And finally, there's the person who needs to feel in control of the fandom for whatever reason they can come up with.

I could write paragraph on paragraph on each of these. I wish I had the capacity to do so, but I want to use my marathon writing abilities to explore the emotional depth of characters in my personal Digimon canon instead. These archetypes aren't hard enough definitions that I can't be convinced of their validity, but I wanna express that their validity can't and shouldn't be at the cost of the health of the fandom itself. It's flabbergasting how my dream of anime becoming almost completely mainstream is happening and I almost hate identifying with my fellow nerds in public conversations. Outside of hopeful film makers and longtime buffs, like the kind who introduced you to A24 films before the corporate pivot, it seems like people only gather to talk about how shitty movies and TV are to them instead of what they actually want to see. Some of it has to do with literacy problems, I know, but ability and willingness to engage are not a singular circle.

This isn't a long speech to tell someone to stop watching a particular genre (Shōnenites you can relax) or to do some esoteric mind expansion technique. I'll even put myself out and say I realized most of this when I noticed that I spent far too much time attempting to validate my objectivity by obsessively attempting to correct or criticize the things I believed I loved. And by the end of some of those conversations, I saw that I never even spoke on the themes or moments that brought me in the fandom in the first place.

In short, I want more people to take stock of how they talk about the things they like. It isn't about a sacred balance of criticism or praise, but moreso resisting the urge to try and become things you aren't to denote yourself in a conversation that is probably not happening the way that you're imagining. Recognize that you can influence but you can't control everything. Live in the present, but don't forget everything from before. Remember most of all that these spaces, these fandoms, were meant first to bring us all together in a shared love.