ode to fanart

When I'm reading a new book or watching a new show, I can physically feel it in my bones the second it crosses the line from casual enjoyer to "this is about to consume my life, isn't it". It's an aching in my chest that makes me want to think about the media all the time, but a good kind of aching. Maybe it's what getting a crush feels like. A new obsession. 

I am incapable of enjoying things normally, a fact which has been proven time and time again since basically elementary school as I've made a home in countless fandoms (It is actually countable, I have a running notes app list of every fandom I can think of that I update periodically). Sometimes they are shorter stays and sometimes they're extended visits. And sometimes they just never leave my brain, lying dormant and then jumping out from behind a potted plant when a new development happens in the fandom (example: The Hunger Games). 

Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly happy to be here—"here" being fandom spaces as a whole—I wonder what life's like for people who have never been invested in something enough to join a fandom. Most everyone has interests, favorite musicians, TV shows, books, but there is a bit of a difference between interest and fandom. Part of it is being online because that is where most of the community happens, but I think there's merit to being wholeheartedly obsessed with something on your own. But either way, there are people who aren't hardcore fans of anything, and it looks a bit alien to me sometimes. Obviously I can't read their minds and I'm purely assuming, and I do recognize the potential faults in that. Just because I don't think my friends have stan accounts and they don't really post about their media interests too often doesn't mean they don't consider themselves fangirls. Maybe they do! I hope they do! But for a while, especially in high school, I always felt kinda alone in my behavior. I was (very) online, so I was surrounded by other fans in that sense (although I didn't actually start making friends online until quarantine), but in real life it felt like all of my friends had grown out of their fangirl "phases". I think now that we're in/out of college, it's allowed people to learn how to better express themselves, now that we were free from the stifling grasp of high school. Just from observation it seems like a lot of people I went to school with have started experimenting with their fashion, coming out as queer, and being more openly passionate about their interests. Which is genuinely incredible to me and the main reason why I don't just unfollow randoms from high school, because I love watching them on this journey. 

I totally went off on a tangent. Give me a second to realign myself.

I am a spoiler purist. I loathe spoilers in any capacity. If I accidentally stumble upon a spoiler for a show I'm watching I will attempt to scrub my brain of it and hypnotize myself into believing that I never saw it. It never really works, unfortunately. Let me know if you have a better method. It doesn't run the media for me, but I love the feeling of going into something completely blind. I've been "late" to so many fandoms and yet had a great viewing/reading experience because somehow, I have entirely avoided spoilers. I went into Avengers: Endgame basically blind and I watched it in the big year 2024. Despite everyone and their mother being a hardcore Marvel fan in 2019, the only spoiler I knew going in was that Tony dies, and that was thanks to that one stan twitter tweet that goes "since y'all are being assholes for taylor, iron man dies in endgame". Which is kind of an insane way to be spoiled (I did also know about the I love you 3000 thing because I do remember that being everywhere at the time, but I didn't know the context at all). So whenever I watch something for the first time, especially if it's a currently popular show, I will go scorched earth on the muted tags setting. No name, title, or hashtag will escape my filter. They will all be muted until I finish it, and then I have to do the slightly tedious task of unmuting everything one at a time.

But it's all worth it in the end, because once I finish, I can ~enter the fandom~.

This is kinda what it's all about for me. Visiting a new fandom is one of the best feelings. Knowing that you have an entire world of fanart, fanfiction, headcanons, posts, playlists, everything, newly at your disposal. Assuming it's not a brand new show, at least. I am currently reading the Raven Cycle series (which has been on my TBR list for, and I'm not exaggerating, 9 years), and I have one book left in the main series. I had to do the terrible task of making a decision. I just shivered. The decision was if I should start the last book right away (because I devoured the first three in the span of a week), or if I should space it out a bit. There is merit to both sides here: if I read the last book now I get to know what happens and how it ends (duh), and I get to search the tag on Tumblr and Twitter and scroll to my heart's content, unlocking a whole new world. But if I read it just as quickly as the others... then what do I have to look forward to? I'm having so much fun reading this series and falling in love with these characters! I don't want it to end! I've unofficially decided to give myself a few days. I read books 2 and 3 on Libby, so I might go to the physical library to get the last book instead (although I did really like being able to read during my breaks at work)

I still haven't even gotten to the main reason I wanted to write. Hold on.

There is a lot of argument and discourse about art. A lot of it. Especially about the merits of contemporary art. It feels very black and white sometimes; either you love it or you hate it. I'm in the camp of loving it, just because I can't find a good reason to hate on it in its entirety. I think the "I could make this myself" reasoning is stupid (Then go on, make it! Have fun! Why wouldn't I encourage making art!). On Substack earlier today, I saw a post that was quote retweeting (quote restacking?) another one. The original poster made the claim that "The average person encounters very little art in their life" and uses examples like "seeing a painting in-person". I get what they're trying to say at a fundamental level, because that post was in response to a statistic that allegedly 48% of the US reads zero books a year. But I think it's inane to claim that "There are many people who have not seen a painting in-person once in their whole life" (also this is just untrue? Maybe I just live in a city with a lot of murals but I cannot fathom someone never seeing a painting? Although now that I write this I'm realizing OP probably was thinking only of museum paintings). The quote retweet was the one that came up on my timeline, which argued a similar point to me. They maintain that art is everywhere, and it's classist to define art as "just 17th century paintings and Greek sculptures and symphonies." They list a whole slew of things that are considered art, and I agree! 

Art IS everywhere, and that is one of the merits of contemporary art. In this day and age, art is accessible. Artists will host events in the streets of their town, demonstrate their craft to the public, put up art on storefronts and walls. There are movie theaters (which are not dying... not in my world I'm living in...), film festivals, outdoor movie screenings in parks. There are libraries, whether it's public buildings or Little Free ones. And there's one of my favorite forms of contemporary art, fanart.

Fanart isn't new if you really think about it. I mean, how many paintings of Jesus have been commissioned? That is an uncountable number. Art inspires art, it always has and always will. Whether it's authors, painters, or musicians, they all are able to draw from other creators for inspiration. (And while I deeply hate the seemingly nonstop slew of 2020s songs that are directly sampling the choruses of hits from the 2000s or earlier, it does kinda fall into this category. Even though I mostly think they're a lazy chart grab.)

I love fanart. I do make it myself sometimes, but I mostly love scrolling through it, watching my phone become a mini gallery. I think it's incredible, the things people can do with these characters who have inspired them so strongly. Every so often, something will release and it will be so mass-inspiring that my social media timelines are covered with art. The creators must get such a rush of dopamine seeing how their work is being received. Social media is actual hell on Earth, but these creative renaissances are the few pockets of pure happiness and dedication and peace. When something is just so deeply compelling that you can't help but create a response. I've witnessed all kinds of fandom art renaissances, and they can come from anything! All the spidersonas based on Into The Spiderverse. People expanding the universe created in Agust D's Daechwita music video. Fanzines made of community art submissions about all kinds of fandoms. Paramore's "Re: This Is Why" album, where each artist gets to put their own unique spin on the original song. Art using the aesthetics (and all the worldbuilding, hell there's even an official language!) of the current My Chemical Romance tour. It is just so much fun to open up the tag and start scrolling. For me, it's whatever the opposite of doomscrolling is. Hopescrolling?

I love fanart. I love fandom. I love being a fangirl, and I love the endless cycle of art inspiring art inspiring art. And I can't lie, right now I'm mostly just excited to take an extended vacation in The Raven Cycle Tumblr tag once I finish the last book.