How fandom went feral and became profitable

Early incubation and fostering of stan culture.

Feral fandom sounds like an insult, but it’s an old term used to refer to fandom that springs up separately from organized fan communities, independently of fan created structures and outside the spaces that inculcate people into community norms and traditions.

Feral fandom is easier to exploit because it has no allegiance other than to the fan object, and the so-called The Powers That Be that dole out more—more content, more “connection,” more validation, you name it.

This is partly what I talked about on the Money4Nothing podcast. Not just fans going feral, but also industry tapping into that so-called affect economy and stoking the flames.

So let’s look at some lynchpins for today’s corporate fandom climate.

OhNoTheyDidn’t and peer-to-peer celebrity gossip

In 2011, it was estimated that the online celebrity gossip industry was generating $3 billion a year, but celebrity gossip had become an online phenomenon long before that.

The crowdsourced celebrity gossip community OhNoTheyDidn’t (ONTD) was a big part of expanding the gossip footprint. It blended all types of celebrity content and pop culture news, marrying fandom and celebrity watching and spirals of speculation.

Because of the peer-to-peer setup, it felt like a grassroots source, except that also meant it was easily exploitable by those pushing an agenda. I discovered Lana Del Rey and Katy Perry through ONTD, and it felt like getting in on the ground floor, even though they were already backed by the big label machinery. The blog made it feel “organic” which is hilarious in hindsight.

This wasn’t entirely a supportive community, fostering just as much fervent anti-fandom as devoted stans, so coverage would usually either be overwhelmingly fawning or derogatory.

ONTD also spawned off multiple sub-communities dedicated to politics, (rebooted) Star Trek, American Idol, and One Direction, which became home to the more dedicated fans who wanted to insulate themselves from the wider ONTD user base, but still engage the way they were used to.

Would we have a NYT piece on Taylor Swift being secretly gay without the long-running saga of Toothy Tile?

There’s also the proliferation of so-called “blind items.” ONTD didn’t invent the concept, but they brought them to the hungry masses and budding secret knowledge communities of online feral fandom.

These pieces of gossip are called “blind” because they are anonymized, using strings of descriptive epithets to heavily imply who the gossip is about. Blind items are still a thing in fandom, proliferating via accounts such as Deuxmoi and the classic Blind Gossip site.

Blinds - a great way to feed fans without rocking the boat via more official sources.

Speculation is engagement, so it makes sense that it would be promoted and that fan theories would be catered to. For over a decade, a site called Gossip Cop acted as the PR mouthpiece to refute (or confirm) what was being gossiped about online and what tabloids were reporting.

In a meta moment, a 2011 NYT article on stan culture was shared to the community, tagged with the comment, “lol this is a respected newspaper? how bored do you have to be to write an article on stanning anyway jfc,” as if the community itself wasn’t responsible for normalizing and amplifying the behaviour that warranted this type of coverage.

FriendsOrEnemies and emo bandom parasociality

Buzznet and Friendsorenemies (FOE) were early music focused social sites that often fed into ONTD. Both sites have essentially vanished from the net, taking with them years of online emo and scene kids history. Despite their erasure, they still had an impact and their influence is indisputable.

They were both similar to MySpace, but also functioned as a proto-Instagram; photos and videos were shared, and you could make “friends” (or enemies, in the case of FOE), and there were equivalents to influencers in the form of scene kids, and band members were active and accessible to an insane degree.

While looking for people’s experiences with the sites I found a claim from someone that at age 13, she was mutuals (i.e., following and followed by) with a girlfriend and wife of band members she was a fan of and regularly communicated with them privately. The veracity of this particular claim cannot be confirmed, but this was definitely a thing. She said, “The separation between bandom social spheres and fans was literally non-existent on that cursed website.”

This might seem like a duh statement these days, but Instagram didn’t exist, neither did Twitter, and YouTube was only just getting its feet wet. Multiple band members had gotten their start on Livejournal, but it wasn’t used much for fan engagement. Buzznet and FOE changed that.

The main difference between the two sites is that FOE was focused around emo and pop punk bands of the day, especially those connected to Pete Wentz or signed to his imprint. The site appeared in 2005, and was promoted by Wentz wearing a friendsorenemies.com branded t-shirt while visiting TRL on the day the site became active, feeding into the trend of “signalling” fans with clothes, something you’ll find in all fandoms.

I’ve mentioned how emo bandom was essential to mainstreaming real person slash shipping before, in part because of the access that fans and fan objects had to each other, and because this access was framed as a mutual relationship rather than an asymmetrical parasocial fan → fan object relationship and fan → brand relationship.

Entry from Pete Wentz’ blogspot.

If you think Swifties go overboard in analyzing lyrics, rest assured they are only carrying on the legacy of the hardcore emo fans who were being fed quite well by Wentz’ multiple online accounts, all bread crumbing fans with the illusion of intimacy, and dropping lyrics years before they would appear on albums.

One Direction and for profit fan fiction

One of the longstanding rules of fandom was fan fiction is not for profit. There is a basic legal reason for this, because for work to be “fair use” it has to be non-commercial, but it's also because it's seen as a violation of fandom’s gift economy, and the reason why people participate in the first place.

The workaround to this rule is referred to as “filing off the serial numbers,” which is when edits such as name changes are performed to separate the piece from the fandom.

This is what happened with E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey.” The fic was originally published on Fanfiction.net, then picked up by a Twilight fan fiction archive turned independent publisher, then getting a mainstream push via Penguin. This big push is why it’s so well known, but it’s far from the only Twilight fic that has been published for profit— the list is long, and multiple fan fiction archives became for profit publishers themselves.

Considering the big business of gossip that is discussed earlier in this very piece, it shouldn’t be surprising that real person fiction was next up to get repurposed for mass market consumption.

In 2012, the very same year that “Fifty Shades of Grey” hit the mainstream publishing world, a One Direction fan fiction was picked up for publication by Penguin. This was year two of 1D, so that should tell you how quickly the iron was being struck.

When her publishing deal was announced, sixteen-year old Emily Baker allegedly said, “I'd really love [One Direction] to read my book when it comes out, though! That would be nice.”

Even expressing the desire to break the fourth wall is a violation of fandom norms, exemplifying the feral nature of the new fans. Not only are you not supposed to profit from fan fiction based on existing characters, or worse in this case, real people, you absolutely, categorically should not try to get them to engage with it.

In my slash post, I quoted Vicky-T complimenting a smutty fic featuring herself and Greta Salpeter. Conflicts of interest abound. Quote and graphic via Nancy K Baym’s 2011 Transforming Audiences presentation.

In 2011, one year into representing One Direction, Sony Music teamed up with Wattpad, another online fiction site, to roll out “a five-part Valentine’s Day-themed story with each chapter detailing a date with a member of [One Direction].” This was official fan fiction, and gifted to the fandom with a “Happy Valentine’s Day!” from the band’s official Facebook account.

Wattpad is another site where fan and original fiction flourishes, and they have made it their mandate to funnel fan fiction into traditional publishing and then the big screen.

In 2014, they launched the 1D fan fiction “After” into the mainstream, and it’s become a book and film series. They haven’t slowed down since, another recent success story being the Anne Hathaway film “The Idea of You,” which, naturally, was 1D fan fiction originally.¹

Is there any place for old school fandom norms when corporations get involved? Is there any point in yelling at the clouds when profit-making is on the horizon? Can we blame fans and fandom for being feral, in all senses of the word, when they are being goaded in this way?

Lots of questions, no good answers.

Still, I’ll continue documenting how we got here, how lines were blurred and crossed, because it's the only way we’ll get anywhere near any answers.

1. I have no qualms saying it’s always the worst of the bunch that gets the big rollouts. I say that as someone who is utterly shameless about loving fan fiction. Just not the Mary Sue self-insert Harlequin lites that apparently do so well with publishers, studios and mass audiences.

Part of the reason this is the content breaking through is that Wattpad, whose aim is to push things to the mainstream, primarily contains self-insert fan fiction. In 2015, 89% of the site was determined to be just that. See also, stats comparing the content on Wattpad and other fan fiction archives from 2019, via destinationtoast.