I would like to ask people why they’re in fandom, but I’m not sure it’s polite to ask, and I’m not sure anyone entirely knows the answer.
As far as I can tell people are usually in fandom for a reason: it fills some kind of gap. I don’t mean that in a condescending way. Every hobby fills a gap,…
I’m in fandom because these are my stories. I don’t care what intellectual property law says. You give me a story and ask me to fall in love with it, it becomes mine. I’ll read it the way I choose, I’ll enjoy it the way I want to, and until the day when mind control is invented, nobody can stop me. That’s what stories are.
And those stories do the thing that stories do once they nest in your brain: they breed and grow and have little baby stories. And I want to share those stories, so that I can have someone else to enjoy them and talk about them with. And I want to share other peoples’ stories, for the same reason, so that we can experience that joy together.
That’s the fundamental reason I’m in fandom. All the rest—the intellectual challenge of analyzing plot and character, the fulfillment of stretching my writing wings and improving a skill, the anthropological curiosity in the nature of fandom—those are all there, but they’re subordinate to that basic drive to share and experience our stories together.
I suppose you could call that loneliness, but that’s like saying the human condition is loneliness, like saying that we learn language because we want to reach out and communicate. Well, yes, and what we want to communicate about is our stories.