Fandom, sex and community

By Naomi Curston

An aerial shot of a huge crowd of people, mostly dressed in red, reaching their hands towards a figure in the centre.

I would be open to doing some morally questionable things if I thought it would help me get Part 5 of Money Heist any quicker.

That's because I'm a fan of it, I like it.

What makes me part of the fandom is writing mini-essays about it on Tumblr, reading and writing fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3) and generally interpreting and reinterpreting with other fans in a way that fulfils our needs.

Fandom differs from being a fan because you can't do it on your own.

Transformative fandom specifically is a community dominated by women, which explores the topics left out of mass media through art, and in doing so tries to make the world just a little more inclusive.

Fandom as support system

Francesca Coppa, 50, is a professor of English at Muhlenberg College and one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works.

(The OTW aims to provide access to, preserve and protect fan works and fan culture. They created fanfiction website AO3, among other things.)

On fandom, Professor Coppa said: “I mean that I am living in a female, queer, sometimes racebent art world, where people who I think are great artists are custom-making art for me with this text of source material.

“And that communal participation that we are all having together is what I mean when I say I am in a fandom.”

Community is practical

She stressed how fandom community was tangible and practical: it meant baby clothes in the mail when she gave birth, it meant women in strange cities turning up and taking her to lunch and it meant inviting people to crash on her sofa on the basis of having read their fic three years ago.

It also meant millions of dollars of free labour when building the OTW – everything from legal work to coding – just because people cared so much.

On a smaller scale, Whiteley Foster, 26, a freelance artist in the US and Good Omens fan, sometimes sells prints for fan artists in other countries to reduce their shipping costs, even though she may never meet them in person.

“I know that they’d do the same for me in a heartbeat,” she said.

Fans, Covid-19 and mental illness

Fandom spaces can also be safe havens for people when they're struggling, and this was thrown into sharp relief as fans around the world grappled with the threat of Covid-19 this spring.

Scaramacai, a 16-year-old art student and Good Omens fan artist from Italy said they found lockdown really hard physically and emotionally.

Still, “without the Good Omens fandom it would be harder,” they said.

Just seeing other people's fan art made them feel motivated again.

Evendale is a 32-year-old university professor living in Belgium.

She’s a fanfiction writer and a member of the Money Heist fandom.

She managed to keep writing during the pandemic, and in doing so she's supported both her readers and herself.

In April, she was hit by a particularly bad depressive episode and found herself really struggling with her story.

“I forced myself to keep writing through it and that really helped me get better as well,” she said. “But one of the reasons I kept writing was because I knew my readers were waiting for the next chapter.”

She was particularly motivated because readers had been telling her that her fic helped them feel less isolated, lonely and bored during the pandemic.

“In fandom we help and support each other simply by being there,” she said.

PinkPiggy93, 27, an English teacher from Vietnam and Good Omens fan, has also kept creating, and tried to lighten the mood for her followers.

“It’s been pretty depressing, so I try to do comedy to give them something to feel good about,” she said.

She also produced a line-art only version of one of her pieces of art for people to colour in lockdown.

Whiteley Foster, meanwhile, didn't report an art block like Scaramacai, but still found herself feeling a little useless during the pandemic compared to her best friend, who's a nurse.

Then people started messaging her, telling her that her art had brightened their day in spite of everything.

“I realised that the part I play in this does not need to be the same as someone who is actively in the field,” she said.

A bar late at night. Plants hang from the ceiling and it's warmly lit. In the bottom left of the image you can see a couple sitting opposite one another. A blonde man in light-coloured clothing has his back to us, and a man with red hair and dark clothes is looking at him fondly from across the table. It's Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens.

An image of two people - Aziraphale and Crowley - lying on the grass. There is a rainbow lens flare across the image. Both men are smiling. Crowley has long red hair and Aziraphale has short curly blonde hair.

A quote from Evendale's Money Heist fanfiction called Calculated Risks. "Tonight, in the golden atmosphere they had created between the sheets, they both felt a fleeting touch of magic. [...] As they slowly moved together, skin against skin, sensual pleasure merged seamlessly with emotional bliss to shape an experience that transcended the physical, pure and beautiful and true. At its zenith, it left them breathless and trembling, lifted out of themselves for one glorious, eternal moment, to come back down to a sweet awareness of profound and complete fulfillment."

Aziraphale and Crowley kissing in front of a sign saying '1920' in lights. It's a New Year party. Crowley has short red hair and is wearing a sparkly headband and black flapper dress. Aziraphale has short blond hair and is wearing a tan waistcoat over a long-sleeved shirt.

A close up of the previous image, only showing the faces of the couple.

Fandom, sex and art

Support isn't always about lighthearted comics, helping hands or encouraging messages.

In 2013, an unofficial AO3 census found, to no one’s surprise, that the most popular fanfiction ratings on the site were ‘Mature’ and ‘Explicit’.

These are the ratings where you can find all the sex scenes (aka ‘smut’).

Almost all of Evendale’s stories are rated E, and almost all of them include sexually explicit scenes.

While it’s completely valid to enjoy sexy fics because, well, you can, Evendale has had some extraordinary reactions to hers.

She said one adult reader reached out to say that after reading her first smut (one of Evendale’s fics) she realised that she wasn’t asexual, which she’d always thought she was.

A married reader said the stories had saved her marriage – because they made her want to have sex with her husband again, after years not wanting to.

“It really shows that for some people these smut fics can really have an impact,” Evendale said.

And it's not just smutty fics that can be almost therapeutic.

Whiteley Foster found that drawing NSFW fan art helped her negotiate her own relationship with sex.

She’s asexual, which means she doesn’t experience sexual attraction, but she’s not repulsed by sex (although some asexual people are – everyone’s different).

Still, she felt broken sometimes because she didn’t mind seeing characters in sexually explicit art, and yet had no desire for it herself.

“When I started drawing NSFW art that went away,” she said.

“Yes, I get into spaces where I want to see these characters in NSFW situations, but instead of feeling broken, I felt like I had taken that energy and put it toward something I could be proud of.

“That wasn’t sex for me, it was art.”

“Fandom doesn’t fix everything, but it could”

The question is, why is fandom tackling issues of sexuality and mental health so enthusiastically?

Why is it uniting artists and clothing babies and building huge online archives?

Why do people start by watching six hours of TV and end up arguing about gender, brandishing coffee shop AUs (alternate universes) in one fist and deeply traumatic angst in the other?

Rejecting mass media's maleness

Maybe because fandom – at least, transformative fandom – is made primarily by and for the people who are not properly served by the media they love.

If mass media generally serves straight cis men, fandom serves women and LGBTQ+ people.

These groups who are excluded are trying to create a space that's as inclusive as possible.

This is illustrated in the graph above, which shows more than 70% of fan activities reported by cis men to be non-transformative.

All other groups have higher rates of transformative fandom, and it's striking that the trend emerged so prominently in a small dataset.

It's also striking that the gender identity of the self-selected survey participants mirrored the much larger, but still self-selected, unofficial AO3 census in 2013, where cis women dominated and trans and non-binary gender identities were over-represented too.

And it's all because, as Professor Coppa says: “You don’t have to transform it if it’s written for you.”

Fandom's racism problem

A big hole in fandom's attempt to be inclusive, unfortunately, is racism.

Mass media isn't just produced by and for men, it's produced by and for white men.

Professor Coppa said: “Fans have a really sophisticated toolbox and a well-organised response to counter sexism and homophobia in mainstream stories, but lack an analogously strong toolbox for addressing racism.”

She explained that fandom’s relationship with race today is a direct descendant of the emerging media fandoms of the 1960s and 1970s, like Star Trek.

People had been writing fanfiction for science-fiction books and magazines since at least the 1930s, but the women who wrote media fanfiction in the 1960s onwards were the ones who started fanfiction zine culture.

That culture incubated tropes, language and terminology that are still used today.

Slash (male/male romance), mpreg (male pregnancy), bodyswap and domestic fic all still exist, and consider sexuality and gender and communication.

There’s no comparable trope that focuses on race.

It doesn't mean that fandom can't be actively anti-racist, but it does mean that fans have to work outside traditional tropes to achieve it, and not everyone is doing that work.

As Professor Coppa put it: “Fandom doesn’t fix everything, but it could.

“The concept can, but it doesn’t yet.”

Trouble in paradise

The thing is, even when negotiating topics that it is historically good at, fandom doesn't always get it right.

PinkPiggy93 said that attacks on her art affected her far more negatively than lockdown had.

A small subsection of Good Omens fans called her transphobic and homophobic when she depicted a usually male-presenting couple as male and female.

It's worth noting that these supernatural characters are generally considered agender or genderfluid (depending on your interpretation) and there is a lot of Good Omens fanwork that plays with gender.

In the TV show, one character presents female briefly, and in the 30-year-old book, it's established that they are in fact sexless unless they decide not to be (they are only “men-shaped creatures,” not men) - implying that they have the ability to change sex at will.

https://datfandomweirdness.tumblr.com/post/617296012918259712/i-hate-this-pinkpiggy93-is-a-super-great-artist

What could have been an opportunity for productive discussion about gender and sexuality and feeling safe, just became an attack instead.

Fandom is a community, but like every large group of people, there will always be a darker, crueller side.

How fandom transforms media

“Shows often don’t develop relationships as deeply as we would want them to,” Evendale said.

“So I think that’s why a lot of woman gravitate towards fandom.”

Professor Coppa added: “Where’s all the being a person?”

That's what fandom really does.

It may address inequality, but it's adding in these undervalued elements of stories because they are important to the people who make the art - relationships, sex, emotional work and even domestic labour - and that collective effort makes the community.

(“Everybody goes: ‘oh my goodness, Steve Rogers is naked. But fandom is almost equally obsessed with ‘how does Steve do his dry cleaning?’ ‘What are they eating?’,” said Professor Coppa.)

https://holycatsandrabbits.tumblr.com/post/620454091867488256/ursulaismymiddlename-destiel-isendgame

Give fandom some vague subtext and eye contact and it'll return you a fleshed-out relationship, plenty of kink and several very sweet meet-cute AUs.

Give fandom unresolved issues and it'll bring its own catharsis.

Leave someone out, and fandom will put them right back in.