My Experience in Fandom

At one point or another, we have all gotten obsessed with some sort of media. Some people just rave about a particular show with just a couple of their close friends. Some might seek larger groups of like-minded people on the internet. Some people just take the source material and never delve deeply into the fandom, while others get sucked into an internet rabbit hole and their life revolves around the media they enjoy. Some people are only in one single fandom, while others are in hundreds.

I, like many others, have also been part of fandoms throughout my life. For some, I would only just consume the source material, while for others I would buy merch for, create fanart and purposefully seek out fandom spaces on the internet.

I consider myself part of a fandom the minute I explicitly search for fan-made content. I have probably been in more than 20 fandoms over the years, each with varying degrees of involvement.

For example, when I was in my K-pop phase, I created a Twitter account to rave about my obsession with a new group, created fan art, and even spent money on albums and concert tickets. On the contrary, when I was more in my anime phase, I never really did too much other than the occasional fanart of a show that I was enjoying but I never bought merchandise or created accounts dedicated to anime.

My lack of purchasing merch and interaction within the fandom spaces is also partially due to my age during the time of some of these phases as 2nd graders do not usually buy a whole manga series or create accounts to talk to strangers on the internet.

Since I am an artist and I think that just generally talking about fandoms I have been in might be a bit boring, I will just talk about some fandoms for which I did create fanart.

The first fandom that I remember creating art for or at least based on was: My Little Pony. Now you may be thinking “oh you must have been young when you made those drawings” but no… I was already in 6th grade during that time.

I got obsessed with the show because it was just fun and a great way to pass time. I don’t remember searching much for fan content but what I do remember is talking to some of my friends at the time about the show. A few of my friends also really enjoyed the show. During this time, I was also getting into drawing as a hobby compared to something that I only had a class for every Thursday.

I don’t remember how, but one of my friends convinced me to create an OC, which is an original character, and my 6th-grade brain thought it would be so much fun. So I spent a couple of days thinking up what I want my character to be like, as I wanted her to be a sort of reflection of myself.

Eventually, I created a character called Rainbow Lily, she was a unicorn (also for some reason I drew her cutie mark as a lotus instead of a lily). My friend had a character called Sky Song and we made a youtube channel together. It was a weird time in my life, making pony OCs and making youtube videos of them but overall my fandom experience was limited to the people I knew in real life at the time.

The next fandom that I remember creating fanart for was Fairytail, now this one I got into during the summer of 6th and 7th grade. I just remember at this time started using IbisPaint X on my phone and I wasn’t feeling too inspired to draw. Eventually, I did end up redrawing a screenshot from the show but other than that I didn’t do too much with this fandom. I do think that some of my earlier character designs were heavily based on the characters in the show though. Either way, this phase was more on annoying everyone around me by telling them to watch the show than doing much else.

Right before the COVID-19 pandemic happened, I was still in my anime phase and really liked My Hero Academia at the time.

I had a whole period of time in which I just drew fanart of the characters in the show but never created my own original character. I do think that in the MHA fandom, there were a lot more people who enjoyed creating original characters compared to the people who drew fanart of pre-existing ones, so I have no idea how I never wanted to create a character of my own at the time. There was a whole period of time in 2019 when most of my posts on Instagram were purely just MHA fanart.

During this time, I do remember interacting more with other fans, whether it be liking fan art I found on Instagram or chatting with people in real life who I knew also liked the show. It was fun while it lasted but seeing the fandom now, I don’t think I would really want to go back.

There were also smaller pieces of fan art I did because I didn’t know what to draw. For example:

(from left to right) Hatsune Miku (Vocaloid), Nezuko (demon slayer), Shirayuki (Snow White with the Red Hair) and one of my friend’s OC in a Haikyuu outfit.

Other than that I didn’t really draw as much fanart as I did back in my previous phases. I think this also had to do with the fact that I was enjoying creating my own characters not based on any media during that time.

The last fandoms which I remember creating fan art for were BTS and Enhypen, which are both K-pop groups. These were also the fandoms for which I bought my first merch and created accounts on the internet, trying to interact with other people in K-pop.

I joined many Discord servers looking for people to talk to about comebacks and even made a whole Twitter account dedicated to K-pop. I think that this was the fandom from which I really did get the full fandom experience. I was watching music videos or reality shows, creating fan art, reading theories, getting involved in fandom drama, reading fanfiction, and buying albums and posters.

I was, to say the least, absolutely obsessed.

I originally created K-pop fanart during my BTS phase because I didn’t really know how to interact with other fans online other than creating fan art as it was really the only thing I knew how to do during that time. Eventually, I realized that I didn’t have to always create art to satisfy other fans and instead just went back to creating original characters while also interacting with the fandom in other ways like joining group chats to talk about a new comeback.

So that was basically the end of my K-pop fan art, or so I thought until I got into Enhypen. Originally I was also interacting with people like I used to with all the other K-pop fandoms, but my obsession with the group kept growing. I didn’t feel satisfied just talking with people, I wanted to create art. I wanted to really contribute something that I really liked doing to the fandom, and that something was creating art. I created some drawings here and there, only really posting them on Twitter.

Although I created fan art for multiple different fandoms across multiple years, I do not consider myself a fan artist since my involvement in fandom never really revolved around creating art.