Fandoms of Potentia and Fandoms of Re, by mikkeneko@tumblr

[magistrate]

I'm posting this here because I want to reference it in a post I want to write, and my experience of linking to / bookmarking things on Tumblr tells me that Tumblr is even less of a persistent medium than the rest of the internet. To give credit as best I can, though, the original URL (as of this post's date) is this post on mikkeneko's tumblr, and the participants in the conversation are mikkeneko and bitchjerked. None of the below are my words.

Credit to storyinmypocket for linking me to the post in the first place; it is very nice to have words to describe phenomena.

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bitchjerked:

do you ever get mad because there’s so much wasted potential in characters and relationships and plotlines in some shows

mikkeneko:

i basically divide up fandoms of continuing media into Fandoms Of Potentia and Fandoms Of Re.

i’m still developing this theory, but it sort of goes like this: there are some pieces of media that attract enormous followings not necessarily for what they are, but what the watchers think they could be, and build castles basically on those dreams of potential.

whereas a fandom of re is a fandom of what the work is, oftentimes a finished work to which no more will be added, which has proven itself in entirety.

And the interesting thing to me is that Fandoms Of Potentia are oftentimes bigger than Fandoms Of Re, bigger and more active, and there’s a couple of reasons for that – one is that a finished work leaves less room to add onto, and a finished work also leaves less need to add onto. The primary driver of fandom works is incompleteness, whether because the work is not yet finished or because it is finished in a way that the audience feels is incomplete.

Fandoms of potentia also have the bigger drama, because the fact is, not every content creator is up to living up to the potential the fans see. Creators are only human after all. So when the story doesn’t live up to the big finish the fans dreamed of, there’s a lot of disappointment, anger and hurt. You see less of that with Fandoms Of Re.

I guess where I’m going with this, is that whenever I see a huge fandom gathering for a work that I think is absolutely not deserving of it, I stop to ask myself whether it might be a Fandom Of Potentia. In which case, they’re fans of something I don’t see at all – they’re fans of the dreams of what might be.

Comments

[indywind]

Isn't that the truth!

This wondering was prompted for me by wanting to be fannish about something, but not getting hooked --not by sources that are big fandoms for others (which, meh, not too surprising, my tastes are not usually well aligned with majority) but also not things I really thought I'd be more into.

Depressive anhedonia is probably a part of it for me--I'm having a harder time getting really into many things I'd expect to enjoy, not just media sources, and I've had a coincident upswing in other depression symptoms. But I have the sense that it's not just my brain being wacky, because I am enjoying some things, including some media sources. Just not they way I'd've expected.

A sudden change in the balance between Re and Potentia, or hooks or development in Re, like happened with you, seems like an obvious potential fandom-breaker (or fandom-igniter, for someone who finds the change an improvement). It's why I was initially pretty fannish about Marvel Comics Movie Universe, but stopped being fannishly invested after the Winter Soldier, even though Spider Man: Homecoming and Black Panther should have grabbed me if the rest of the extended fandom sources didn't.