The Many Ways to Enjoy Fandom

I got to visit one of my best college friends over the last weekend for the first time in almost 4 years. Our friendship began on a white water rafting trip and deepened as we realized what big nerds we were. But the thing is, even back then, we were two totally different kinds of nerds. She liked Tolkien and high fantasy, James Bond and comic books. I liked video games and kids cartoons, YouTube memes and K-Pop. But our interests had some mild overlap: we both liked Harry Potter and Avatar: the Last Airbender, Studio Ghibli movies and the Avengers.

As the years have gone by, our nerdiness continues to diverge. I learned over this weekend that she has been reading My Hero Academia fanfiction. I've been getting into anime, too, but then I found out that she's never actually seen the show! She's been reading MHA fanfictions fandom blind. Like a crazy person! She reads anything from any fanfic author that she likes, whereas I rely heavily on fandom and ship tags to find what I like. She reads ongoing, incomplete fics. I tend to only read complete works. She has over 5,000 bookmarks on AO3. I have only a few, and delete them once I've finished reading the fic. (Which is apparently not the intended use of the bookmark feature.) I have no less than 10 tabs of fanfic open on my phone at any given time. She finds that chaotic.

I think the common bond that ties us is our unabashed enjoyment of the things we like, the very fact that we engage with fandom at all: writing fic and drawing fanart. We understand each other, even if we don't really enjoy the same kinds of things. We share a mindset, not a list of shows and books that we both like. And I think that's beautiful!