28 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 16, 2019
Beto O’Rourke or cheer on clapbacks
from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (A re-
cent Twitter prompt: “Stan Elizabeth
Warren, but make it poetry.”) The rise
of Donald Trump, who was a pop-
culture icon before he was a politician,
neatly overlaps with the rise of toxic
fandom, and Trump has pronounced
himself “not a fan” of Jeffrey Epstein,
the Vietnam War, and cryptocurrency.
Some fan wars may themselves be wag-
the-dog scenarios. Last
year, a researcher at the
University of Southern
California’s Center for the
Digital Future found that
a significant percentage of
the negative tweets about
“The Last Jedi” came from
Russian trolls.
I
n 1986, “Saturday Night
Live” aired a sketch,
written by Robert Smigel, set at a “Star
Trek” convention, where attendees greet
one another with Vulcan salutes. Wil-
liam Shatner, that week’s host, played
himself, as the guest of honor. Barraged
with inane and arcane questions, Shat-
ner takes a deep breath at a lectern and
says, “Get a life, will you, people? I mean,
for crying out loud, it’s just a TV show!”
The geeks are shell-shocked. “When I
was your age, I didn’t watch television,”
he continues. “I lived. So, move out of
your parents’ basements and get your
own apartments—and grow the hell up!”
At the time, Henry Jenkins was a
twenty-eight-year-old doctoral student
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He had grown up reading Famous Mon-
sters of Filmland and bonded with his
wife, Cynthia, over “Star Trek.” (He ex-
plained to me that the preferred term
is Trekkers, not Trekkies.) Jenkins was
fascinated by their different interpreta-
tions of the 1966 episode “The Menag-
erie,” in which Spock acts uncharacter-
istically emotional in flashbacks. Jenkins
had read up on production history and
knew that the show had reused foot-
age from an unaired pilot; Cynthia had
thought that Spock had been explor-
ing his human side, as opposed to his
more stoic Vulcan side. When Jenkins
saw the “S.N.L.” sketch, it “got in my
craw a bit,” he told me recently. “But so
did academic writing about fans, which
also treated them as blind consumers
who just bought everything with a ‘Star
Trek’ logo on it.”
Jenkins spent the next several years
researching fan activity. He visited a
group of women in Madison who wrote
“Quantum Leap” fan fiction. He lurked
on the newsgroup alt.tv.twinpeaks, ded-
icated to the David Lynch mystery se-
ries. In 1992, Jenkins published “Textual
Poachers,” an “ethnographic account” in
which he defended fans against per-
nicious stereotypes: the
basement-dwelling vir-
ginal dweeb, the scream-
ing teen girl hurling pant-
ies at Elvis. Jenkins saw
fandom, he told me, as “a
source of creativity and
expression for massive
numbers of people who
would be otherwise ex-
cluded from the commer-
cial sector.” These com-
munities, he said, gave rise to such
vernacular forms as fanzines, cosplay
(fan-made costumes), and fan fiction.
“Textual Poachers” became one of
the founding texts of fan studies, a field
that now surveys everything from adult
Lego enthusiasts to Black Twitter’s re-
lationship with “Scandal.” Since the
book’s publication, the Internet has mag-
nified what Jenkins calls “participatory
culture.” At the site An Archive of Our
Own, which hosts more than thirty-
three thousand fan communities, you
can read fan fiction inspired by “The
Hobbit,” One Direction, and “All About
Eve.” Many of these stories are “slash
fic”—erotic fantasies, often teasing out
homoerotic subtext between the likes
of, say, Kirk and Spock—but there’s a
wide variety of genres, including “cur-
tain fic,” which imagines characters
going about everyday domestic activi-
ties. (Kirk and Spock go appliance shop-
ping.) Fan fiction reached a high-water
mark in 2011, when the writer E. L.
James took her erotic “Twilight” fiction,
changed the characters’ names, and pub-
lished it as “Fifty Shades of Grey.”
Fandom, Jenkins told me, is “born
out of a mix of fascination and frustra-
tion. If you weren’t drawn to it on some
level, you wouldn’t be a fan. But, if it
fully satisfies you, you wouldn’t need to
rewrite it, remake it, re-perform it.” No-
where is Jenkins’s constructive view of
fandom more evident than at Comic-
Con International, in San Diego. Comic-
Con started as the Golden State Comic
Book Convention, in 1970, attracting
some three hundred people. It’s now a
four-day bonanza attended by a hun-
dred and thirty-five thousand fans of
all stripes, many of whom show up in
elaborate cosplay. When I arrived at
this year’s edition, in July, I started see-
ing Spider-Men five blocks from the
convention center. Near the entrance,
a group of Christian protesters—the
oldest fandom, really—was yelling, “The
Syfy channel cannot save your soul!” I
turned around and saw a guy dressed
as Lumière, from “Beauty and the
Beast,” shrugging at me with candle-
stick hands.
Inside the exhibition hall, a sea of
Dumbledores, Stormtroopers, and Sailor
Moons lined up for merchandise and
photo ops. As Comic-Con has bal-
looned, Hollywood franchises have
swept in to market their latest tentpole
projects, unveiling trailers at starry panel
discussions and wrapping fans in a mu-
tual embrace. (By one estimate, pop-cul-
ture conventions in the U.S. are now a
ninety-million-dollar industry.) The
center of the hall was dominated by
build-outs for “Star Wars,” Marvel, and
“Doctor Who.” You had to walk a good
distance to get to the old-school comic-
book bazaar, which was like a rent-sta-
bilized neighborhood in a gentrified
city. A seller named Levi, who was
dressed as Robin and had attended
Comic-Con for fourteen years, said, “It
has sold out, but not in a bad way. There’s
more money, but there’s also a lot more
fandom now.”
I met Daenerys Targaryen in line for
Mega Construx, a rival of Lego that
had built a life-size Iron Throne. Her
real name was Arin, and she was twenty-
three. “I’m trying to get on the Iron
Throne, since I didn’t get to do that on
the TV show,” she told me. She had
been coming to Comic-Con since her
freshman year of high school, when she
dressed as Princess Bubblegum, from
the cartoon series “Adventure Time.”
She said that she had been dismayed
by Daenerys’s downfall, because she saw
the character as a model of female em-
powerment. “I refuse to believe any-
thing that happened in the last season,”
she said, as the line inched forward. “I
mean, I know it happened, but I have
