hi guys ! these are my Humans of Fan Culture interviews. As is explained deeper in the curators note, the goal of these is to find some of the reasons why somebody would leave a fandom. in doing this, I interviewed a few of my friends, and put their interviews onto a website. this is not that website. this one is cooler and has awesome gifs. if you'd like see the original click here. the main takeaways from this are in the curators note, but as a synopsis: it seems from my interviews that the main reasons that people leave fandoms are:
a) Boredom and
b) Bad experiences with the community
Have fun reading my interviews !
I started playing Royal High in like 2016, and that was really fun. I met a lot of friends on there, and I still talk to them. A lot of the stuff I do now, like computer science and game development, I only started because I really wanted to make a game as popular as theirs.
[Now], I only play it when updates come out or just to check in on it, because the developer's husband said some pretty racist things on twitter, and the game felt dead. Nobody really played it anymore because the game wasn't really updating and that was a big thing, they always had seasonal updates and stuff. I think it's a total cash grab. The developers just promote their toys to children and I don't think that's really that cool. I mean, they do charities and stuff, but I still think they've pushed it too far, and it used to be a lot more personal.
I used to be, like, really involved, like my entire life was about it. I don't think I will really get that far into any other fandom because it feels a lot more disappointing when your life is around something and then you just lose interest on it. It just feels, kind of empty.
I mean, as a kid I definitely was part of more fandoms. It was like, oh my god, I love Pokemon, and I love this cartoon, and anime, and all these different things. And now, I think as I got older, it's just like, I have less time. I'm in college, and I have a job, but it's much deeper. I think, like, people ruining fandoms ruin[ed] it for me, and that's why I'm in less.
[When I was] a kid there was definitely a lot more people [who] just did some wild things in the fandoms that I was part of and it just made everyone who was also a part of that fandom look bad. And I didn't want to look bad, because like, while I enjoyed it, it wasn't worth getting made fun of as a kid. Especially in middle school, where you're already so awkward, it just made me insecure about the things I was into. I was a big My Hero fan in middle school, and then there was like, a situation where like, girls were doing inappropriate things to posters of these underage children. And just, so many messed up things that I was just like, I don't want to be part of this. It's a really good show, [but] the show is not this good for me to be roped in with these people. I dropped it completely and I haven't gone back since.
I didn't like to interact with people online until I started to get into fandoms. A lot of it was centered around the pandemic, and there were a lot of discord servers. I think it gave me a better understanding of stuff because I was interacting with people from all around the world. In online communities you find a lot of different people in terms of like neurodivergence and identities and stuff that you probably won't meet very many just in like day to day real life. For a while I started to treat like, you know online connections very seriously.
There was this moment I realized that people knew who I was, because I saw a bunch of people reposting this meme I made, and were saying it in reference to me. And I was like, damn, there are like a few thousand people who are aware of who I am through this, so there was that moment where I was like "I'm not just a spectator in this community, I am actively part of it and shaping the content people are participating in."
I mainly left because of almost a overly Liberal mindset there. It sounds like I'm being political, but I'm just trying to say like basically if you weren't like trans gay and neurodivergent in some way people saw you as like, what are you doing here? I wanted to talk about this game and look at this art or whatever, and people got kind of mad. It flipped it into something very different and it wasn't what I came for so I didn't stick around.
I don't know if you know what Amino is, but it's like a fandom specific social media app. And I remember, like, really, really poorly, drawing people's Animal Jam characters. People were always very nice, like my drawings were horrendous, but I never got anything negative said about them. It was always very appreciative.
When I was in middle school, I got super into both warrior cats and homestuck. I mean, they're more phases than anything. I don't think I ever actively left the fandom, I just sort of fell out of love with it, like it stopped clicking for me.
But I have memories that are very embarrassing about these fandoms that is definitely part of why I'm not in them. I remember describing Firestar as a very noble cat to my friend, and I remember incorrectly remembering all of the Homestuck Zodiac symbols and being corrected by someone on the bus.
I get just as wrapped up in things I'm into now as I did with those things. It's a cycle that's bound to repeat itself.
The goal of my work was to find the primary reasons that someone would leave a fandom. To accomplish this, I asked various people about their own experiences within fandoms. From the interviews, it seems like one of the primary reasons that someone leaves a fandom is just because of lack of new content, causing them to grow out of it. This is seen in Sebastian and Jess's interviews, in which they both express that a primary reason for leaving is purely just getting bored and growing out of it. Another primary reason stated more in Maddie and Breyden's interviews is the community around a fandom. In both of their interviews, a primary reason stated for leaving is just how extreme fandoms can become.
My goal while curating was to portray different experiences within fandoms and in that portray different reasons people end up leaving fandoms. In this, one my main goals was to portray fandoms from different levels of involvement. In Breyden's interview he shows the most direct involvement, being an active and regarded member of the fandom, while in Maddie's they show the least, looking more as a fan of the show with little involvement with the community. Each interview also highlights a different reason that someone would end up leaving a fandom, Sebastians being mainly out of boredom, Jess's being poor decisions by the developers, Maddie's being from not wanting to be roped in with the extreme members of the fandom, and Breyden's being from being alienated out of the community. I chose to show all of these as I believe it shows a more complete image of why people would leave fandoms.
Upon completing all of the interviews, a common trend in most of them seems to be that a large reason for them leaving is just growing up and having less time and energy to be able to put towards a specific media. This left me with the question: How is this 'aging out' of a fandom different depending on the type of fandom? Would someone that was a sports fan from a young age as opposed to a game or cartoon stay a fan for longer?
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