Before Comic-Con there were Janeites, and mourners for a fictional detective
When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, readers staged public displays of mourning for a man who never existed. Within a few years some were writing their own Holmes stories, among the first fan fiction. Scholar Adrianne Wadewitz traced organised fandom even further back, to Jane Austen devotees around 1870.
A fandom is a subculture of fans bound by camaraderie over a shared interest, often obsessed with the smallest details and pouring serious time into it. The word first described sports enthusiasts, but a fandom can form around a single celebrity, a franchise, a whole genre or a fashion. Many overlap, which is why New York Comic Con, Dragon Con, WonderCon and the giant San Diego Comic-Con all mix film, comics, anime, television and costume under one roof.
Much of modern Western fan culture grew out of science fiction fandom, which dates to the 1930s and has held a World Science Fiction Convention every year since 1939. In the early 1970s media fandom broke away, more interested in relationships between characters in shows like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or Star Trek, and producing fan art and fiction while traditional science fiction fans preferred critical debate. American anime fandom began the same way, with fans carrying imported manga to science fiction conventions and, before official licensing, subtitling copies of films to swap among friends.
New branches keep sprouting. The furry fandom, devoted to animal characters with human personalities, traces back to a 1980 science fiction convention where a drawing from Steve Gallacci's Albedo Anthropomorphics sparked talk about such characters in novels. Bronies, adult fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, surfaced on 4chan in late 2010 and early 2011 and took their name from bro plus pony. The Grateful Dead's following, from the late 1960s, built a global community around hippie culture.
Fans rarely just watch. They trade fanzines, run amateur press associations, write fanfic that may ignore canon entirely, make cosplay costumes and fan videos, and share edits and gif sets on Instagram, TikTok and Tumblr, a body of work sometimes called fanac. Some push into activism or charity; the Harry Potter Alliance campaigns on human rights. Sociologists even treat Jediism, which calls itself a real religion distinct from Star Wars, as a participatory phenomenon comparable to fandom.
Source: Fandom
